A Quote by Sarah Hall

Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required.
I love short stories - reading and writing them. The best short stories distill all the potency of a novel into a small but heady draught. They are perfect reading material for the bus or train or for a lunchtime break. Everything extraneous has been strained off by the author. The best short stories pack the heft of any novel, yet resonate like poetry.
I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.
I'm all about empowering women. And by lining them up against the wall and weighing them, surely you are making them feel more like meat than ever - even if it's little meat, if you know what I mean.
I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?
I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me. Alice Munro, I felt that way about from an early time. Grace Paley.
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.
Quickness and momentum. You take the whole last generation of sports, listening to them, even reading about them, watching the games, analyzing them, arguing about them, instant-replaying them, second-guessing them, and all you'll distill from them is quickness and momentum.
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.
Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.
Effective listening is something that can absolutely be learned and mastered. Even if you find attentive listening difficult and, in certain situations, boring or unpleasant, that doesn't mean you can't do it. You just have to know what to work on.
Writing a song isn't that hard. Writing a good song is difficult. Let's face it, we're faced with taking a complex feeling or event, making words rhyme and saying exactly what we want them to say in a short amount of time. ...the primary reason for keeping it short and to the point is to be certain that you're not boring your audience.
Some people have argued that listening to a work of literature does not really promote literacy in the same way that reading does. Having tried this for several months, however, I can report from the trenches that, for me, immersive listening is as intellectually challenging, stimulating, and rewarding as immersive reading.
I started writing the book without realizing I was writing a book. That sounds stupid, but it's true. I'd been trying and failing to make a different manuscript work, and I thought I was just taking a break by writing some short stories. I'm not a very good short story writer - the amazing compression that is required for short stories doesn't come easily to me. But anyway, I thought I'd try to write some short stories. And a structure took shape - I stumbled upon it.
Yeah, I used to write short stories at first, but once you work on something, you want to show people. My peers weren't interested in me reading 30-40 pages to them.
A novel requires a certain kind of world building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see. I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.
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