Story Stickability
What makes a short story stay with you?
A few years ago, I purchased an e-version of William Trevor’s complete short works. I do wish I owned it as a real book.
Recently I went to Macleod’s here in Vancouver, on Pender Street, and found a weighty boxed set. What a treasure. As he stretched from a footstool to reach it for me and pass it down, one of the store-owners—I’m assuming—marvelled: ”I forgot we had this!”
An e-book isn’t a real book. Except, maybe, for travel. But I needed a copy quickly for a reason I don’t recall. And after I read what I was looking for I would pick it up occasionally and read another handful of tales… until I got busy, and left one halfway through.
What stood out then—especially in the miserable e-format—was how every time I picked it up, in spite of leaving mid-way, within a sentence the story would return to me in colour and tone and character. If you’re familiar with this tome—or tomes now, over 800 pages apiece—you know that Mr. Trevor had a large number of stories; I was dipping in and out of that volume for more than a year. And to date many of those stories have stayed with me in ways that so many don’t.
What does it take to create a work that stays with a reader in this way? Or perhaps the question comes to focus on each sentence—it was almost always within the singular sentence that I was invited back into the story.
