... to tell me all about her latest venture...
AW I
understand you have a new anthology that is to be published this week,
Vanessa. Can you tell me a little about
it?
VC First,
thank you very much for hosting me on your blog again, Angela.
French Collection: Twelve Short Stories will be published on Thursday, 9th
November. The stories are all set in
France. My husband and I moved to
southwest France 20 years ago. When I
took up writing fiction, it seemed natural to set many of my short stories
here. French history, culture and art
have provided a lot of inspiration.
AW I know
exactly what you mean. For me it was
the fabulous scenery that I could not leave out my own books.
VC Most of
the stories are historical fiction. So,
for example, one is about a 17th-century pedlar who is chased out of
an Aveyron village for greatly inflating the death toll from the plague in the
town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue.
Another concerns a young woman near Cahors who finds herself pregnant by
her lover who is fighting in the WWI trenches.
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| Market day in Villefranche |
AW Villefranche... a
fabulous old bastide
town that is a favourite of mine! But
back to the book. Hardy, Dickens, Joyce, Dahl and M R James are just
a few of my favourite short story writers, which means that this type of
writing has a long and well established history. With the advent of
e-books, novels seem to me to be getting longer rather than shorter. Is short-story writing for adults a bit old
hat now, do you think?
VC To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Reports of the short
story’s death are premature.” I don’t think it’s an advantage that novels are getting longer. At
the risk of being unpopular, I have found some recently-published novels in
need of an additional pruning.
However, I think publishers
generally find novels more commercially attractive than short story
collections. That said, many modern
novelists come to mind who have published anthologies. Also, last year I was involved in a
collection of short stories set around the time of Pearl Harbour in December
1941. That has been very successful,
especially in the States.
The advantage of shorts is that
they are complete stories that can be read at one sitting. So if you don’t feel like getting immersed
in a much longer work, or don’t have the time, short stories provide a
satisfying alternative. They also give
you a chance to enjoy new genres that you might not otherwise read.
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| Belcastel |
AW Easier or
more difficult? You have a number of
full-length books to your name, so how do the two very different forms compare?
VC I cut my
writing teeth on short stories but I think they are more difficult to write
well than novels. In a novel you have
some leeway for additional description or to elaborate on a scene. In a short story, every single word has to
count. There is no room at all for
extraneous material. You need to grip
the reader’s attention immediately. And
you have to get the main character from A to Z (problem to resolution) in a
very short space. That said, I enjoy
writing short stories and use them to hone my writing skills.
AW Lastly,
Vanessa, with yet another book about to hit the streets, what would your
eight-year-old self, make of you today?
VC When I was
eight, I enjoyed writing stories. You
think you can do anything at that age, so I would have felt it a natural
progression to become a published author later. In reality, education and a career stifled my creativity and I
didn’t take up writing fiction again until 10 years ago. I would have been disappointed if I had
known that at eight years old. But I am
trying to make up for lost time!
...about the author Vanessa Couchman is a British
novelist and short story writer who has lived in southwest France since 1997.
She has written two novels, The House at
Zaronza and The Corsican Widow,
and is working on a third. Her short stories have been placed in competitions
and published in anthologies. Thank you Vanessa and there will be more about Villefranche from yours truly in the next few weeks... watch this space!
Thanks for hosting me on your blog again, Angela. I look forward to your post about Villefranche, one of my favourite local towns.
ReplyDeleteYou're always welcome, Vanessa.
ReplyDelete