THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT

“Short stories? Who reads them?”

“When's the novel?”

“But the story is over before it began.”

Just three of the comments or questions I've heard in the 27 years or so since I published my first short story. It's true that at some point, material begins to overflow, control starts to lapse, and if you are the perennially popular Alice Munro your work reaches that odd length called 'the long short story'. But most of us learn early to 'write short', to pare away everything extraneous, focus on the emotional kernel of the tale; half the pleasure of working on a fiction is the discipline required in crafting a coherent piece of writing around a central image or (more usually in my case) a phrase that wafts into your consciousness.

When does a telling phrase become a story? I remember the excitement with which many readers greeted Lydia Davis when, after ploughing through yet another piece, by a much-lauded writer in some American journal, that seemed like a rather sluggish outtake from a novel, they read her sharp little texts that ranged from parable to riddle to paradigm to joke.

But would Davis' book have the same charm if it didn't also include pieces of traditional narrative, or at least a modicum of narrative flow? Not for me. I want my stories to be stories. When, after my detour into experiments with longer forms, I went back to tight, short pieces possibly more inspired by poetry than by fiction, emotional content still dictated the tale, not a riddle or a philosophical conceit. (A failed marriage. A lonely woman in self-exile. Two old men reliving their lives over the space of a lunch meeting.)

Novels cover a long span of time and can be elastic in their structure. A story has to exist in something that resembles real time but simultaneously practices a deception – in the passing of twenty minutes the reader has to experience two, three or more, and also learn protagonists' past lives, in fragments.

Technically, I now admire stories that are no longer than two or three thousand words long. But the collections I remember best are those in which brief stories grow in your imagination until they seem to fill many pages, or conversely those long stories that are so deftly handled you don't remember how long it took you to read them.

Where, then, does the novella fit in? The brilliant Katherine Anne Porter, in an introduction to her collected stories, wrote: 'novella is a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not  to describe anything.' But there is a rare pleasure in reading those works that have the tension and grace of a short story and the leisure and the space of a novel. Duras' The Lover comes to mind, with its relentless dwelling on an obsessive affair and its beautiful arrangement of scattered images around the awkward persona of its teenaged heroine (herself a phantom, alive only in the mind of the ageing narrator who brings her to life on the page).

We had planned to publish my story Another Gulmohar Tree as the title story of a new collection, but my editor thought it demanded another kind of attention, and she took the perhaps uncommercial decision of publishing it as a slender book.  Today I call the piece a story, though you can name it what you will, but I still take pleasure when I see new editions of the book in the novella format. Does that make a case, then for publishing shorter works on their own, so that they can be read individually with the attention they demand? E-reading facilitates this, but we might also aim for a world in which stories of all lengths are published singly and beautifully, doing honour to the twin arts of the book and the word.

Aamer Hussein is a writer and critic. He is the author of five collections of short stories and reviews regularly for the Independent.