Colm Tóibín explores the art of short story writing

When I was 20 and tentatively trying to write, every single person I knew read Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites (1975). It not only gave the short story a good name, but it also gave writing a good name. It was like a punk moment converted into fiction. People used the word “macabre,” but there was a sort of excitement about the characters, the strangeness of the stories, the shortness of some of the stories and just how much contemporary urban life was in them.

Often people suggest I investigate a writer. I was in Toronto about 20 years ago when someone told me about the extraordinary Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod. He had written two books of short stories which were republished in 2000 in one volume called Island: The Collected Stories. The 16 short stories are exceptional in the way they are constructed. They deal with the very fierce, rugged landscape of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. A lot of people living in very isolated ways, where the possibility of love or community is narrowed. It’s almost like having a book of poetry that you can keep to hand and reread.

When John McGahern wrote The Country Funeral he sent it to a number of magazines, all of whom turned it down, partly because it was too long. It was published in French and then in English at the end of his Collected Stories (2014). It’s one of the great long short stories. It has a relationship to a folk tale, with three brothers crossing Ireland to attend their uncle’s funeral. There’s an extraordinary sentence in the book, within the first few pages: “The poor fact that it is not generally light but shadow that we cast.”

There’s a Chinese novelist called Yan Lianke, I met him once and we had coffee. I’d read one of his later novels, but if only I’d known he was the author of a short story called Marrow (1998). It’s basically a Chinese folk tale grown into a level of horror, hatred, and pain that is unique. It’s about a woman and her sons, who have various illnesses that are hugely exaggerated, into comic grotesque form. It’s not political, it’s not a metaphor for China. I’d love to have asked him if he’d written it at speed. There really isn’t anything like it by a living writer, that I’m aware of. It’s outstanding. It deals with perspicacity, with pain, with remote places. I think short stories are particularly good at dealing with remote places.

Finally – and it would be lovely to talk about short stories all day – I’m going to say Tessa Hadley’s Married Love and Other Stories (2012). I have a technical admiration for her; she makes writing look effortless. No striving seems to have been involved. She used to be a writer’s writer, but in the last decade she’s become a reader’s writer. I used to wait for her short stories in The New Yorker and devour them. I also love her novels – The Past, Latein the Day – but Married Love is the book I return to, the book I give to people. I love the way she starts and sets something up. You’re almost in the comfort zone with the plainness of her writing. The lack of obvious flourish, the slow building up of something… She probably does write draft after draft, but you can’t see any evidence of it. If I could write like Tessa Hadley, I’d be much happier.