by Chris Harris
Let’s be honest, I like to do things quickly.
I have a whirlwind of a mind and an insatiable desire to get as much done as possible, as quickly as possible. It hasn’t always served me well, but it’s simply the way I am wired.
Running an online business, writing two books, maintaining two blogs, and dealing with all the other clutter in the dustbin of life leaves little room for compromise or anything dull, and I’m very perfectly happy with that.
That probably explains why I gravitated towards short stories. I don’t really have the temperament for the traditional writer’s approach: the slow reflection, fastidiousness, endless rewrites, and meticulous planning. The short stories suited my way of thinking. But as my confidence grew, I also began writing a novel set in the same village. In the next blog, I’ll talk about the second novel as I found a way to write it to suit my wayward approach.
What appealed to me about short stories was their experimental nature. As a new writer, I didn’t want to spend years building a novel only to realise halfway through that it simply wasn’t working. That would probably have killed any ambition I had to write a book at all. The short stories allowed me to test ideas, characters, moods, and styles without becoming trapped inside one huge project. Of course, also when they were crap, they were easier to drop!
At the beginning, my partner suggested I should read other short stories to understand the form better. Ironically, I only started doing that yesterday, nearly a year later, at the end of the process. At the time, I deliberately avoided it. Apart from a few blogs, I had no background in writing, and throughout the process I used AI largely as a learning tool to better understand storytelling and structure. For better or worse, I learnt form AI, not from other writers. Silly?
There were two reasons I avoided reading contemporary short fiction. Firstly, I wanted whatever style emerged to be entirely my own. I didn’t want to absorb other people’s rhythms, ideas, or techniques and end up unconsciously imitating them. AI can’t teach you style. Secondly, I had a suspicion that many new writers were being funnelled through the same writing courses and taught the same methods, producing work that felt technically competent but strangely lifeless. I wanted my writing to feel clean, instinctive, alternative, and organic. Not an exercise in middle-class and middle-aged narcissism and navel-gazing.
To me, the easiest way to write is not to force yourself into becoming the sort of writer you think you ought to be. Most aspiring writers seem desperate to fit in with what they imagine literary fiction should sound like. I wanted to ignore all of that and simply write in my own voice.
AI was something I would input my sections of stories into, and it gave me a rough commentary on how I was doing, the good, the bad and the ugly. Essentially, it trained me with pacing, avoiding repetition, depth and consistency. Yes, a lot of that is linked, but in many was it is not and after a few stories I gradually jettisoned AI as I became more confident and gradually the tool became less helpful and more of a hindrance.
Reading a dozen short stories yesterday only reinforced that feeling. Almost all of them felt generic to me: prose written in slightly different variations, endlessly reflecting on feelings, relationships, memories, and emotional observations in ways that all blurred together. Competent, perhaps, but indistinguishable and very dull, in my mind anyway.
Oddly enough, reading them restored my confidence. I’d started doubting what I’d written, but suddenly I realised that what I have is genuinely different. Whether that makes the collection commercially viable is another matter entirely, but at least it feels original.
And because this may well be the only book I ever finish, I’m pleased that it actually sounds like me. My friend Mark, after reading the stories, said they felt like having a conversation with me, and that’s exactly what I wanted.
In the next blog, I’ll talk about the second book, which brings everything back to the present. I actually wrote a blog previously about the methodology behind writing the novel, but if I’m honest, it was rather boring. At its core, it was simply about someone sitting down and writing stories. Navel gazing about navel gazing!
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