Fflur Dafydd talks to Clare Wigfall, winner of the BBC National Short Story Award 2008, about her debut collection – The Loudest Sound and Nothing (Faber, 2007.) The collection has achieved great critical acclaim since its publication, with many likening Wigfall’s voice and narrative control to Helen Simpson and Ian McEwan. Above all, however, Wigfall is a writer with her own distinct voice, who has succeeded in compelling her readers with her strikingly original, savvy and magical prose, breathing new life and vigour into the short story genre. She is hailed as a ‘prodigious new writing talent’ and Wigfall’s stories are currently taught on Swansea University’s Creative and Media Writing MA and the BA English with Creative Writing.

The opening story of your collection ‘The Numbers’ won the coveted BBC National Short Story award in 2008. What made you choose this particular short story as your entry for the competition, and what difference has winning this prize made to your career as a writer? Do you think such prizes give the form a much-needed boost?

I chose to enter The Numbers largely because it was a newly-finished story, so I was excited about it, plus the few people I’d already shown it to had liked it. I knew it was a story that had a strong narrative arc to it, and a strong voice, which I think is important for radio, and of course I knew that any story selected would be broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It might be interesting for your students to learn that I had entered the competition in previous years and got nowhere, which demonstrates that it’s worth persevering, even when at first you don’t succeed. I think maybe the appeal of The Numbers also lies in the fact that it evokes a very specific world, somewhere that is unfamiliar and yet intriguing to most, and I think people like to be transported when they read.
While I was writing it, I deliberately wanted to draw allusions to old folk tales that we might already be familiar with – such as stories of changeling children – but then to subvert these to make the story something that was strange, more contemporary, more realist, and which would wrong-foot the reader/listener more than once so that it would keep their attention.
Has the prize made a difference to my career? Absolutely. Not least because the money has allowed me to focus on my writing for the moment, which feels like an incredible luxury. Moreover, it’s very hard to gain any recognition as a short story writer, and too often I feel we are ghettoised, not quite viewed as fully-fledged authors of any note. Sad to say, but winning prizes certainly helps you to be taken more seriously. Likewise, I hope it has helped to raise the form in the eyes of the public, as well as the media and literary industry. Too often the short story form is viewed as the poor sibling of the novel – worthy, perhaps, but also a little dull and unsatisfying. The truth is that good short stories are anything but.

Your stories often contain a striking amount of absences. I’m thinking in particular about stories such as “Free,” or “Night after Night” where you sustain entire narratives through the unsaid, and what lies beneath the story, or in between the lines of the story, is often extremely powerful. How difficult is it as a writer to maintain the balance between what you decide to leave in and what you decide to take out? Are you yourself sometimes haunted by these silences – or do you always know the answer?

Yes, absence is definitely a quality that characterises my stories, and yet, to be honest, it’s only since the book was published that I’ve become aware of this. I think perhaps it’s a quality that the short story form invites. Within the space of only a few pages, a short story must create a world, a mood, a plot, wholly-real characters, as well as exploring life and its complexities. Economy is therefore an absolute necessity and presents a very specific challenge to the writing, and of course what you leave out becomes as important as what you leave in.
For me, there’s something almost beautifully mathematical and precise about this, and I suppose that perhaps it’s the reason why people say writing a short story is more difficult than writing a novel. I feel in a way that your safety net is taken away, because when you write a short story you’re relying on an unknown quantity: your reader. With a novel you have the space to fill in all the gaps, with a short story you’re forced to leave these for your reader to complete. I believe this is why the very best short stories can haunt you long after you’ve read the concluding line, because so much of the experience is not just about the words on the page, but is individual to you and the way your own brain interprets and digests what you’ve read. There’s something magical about that.
Maybe I utilise absence more than most, perhaps, and you’re correct, getting the balance perfectly right is very difficult because you want to create something that will invite a personal interpretation from the reader, but won’t be so obscure as to alienate them. When it works though, I hope it can make the story more powerful for the reader. Take ‘Night After Night’ as an example; by not naming the husband’s crime, it allows the reader to fill the gap with whatever might be for them, personally, the worst crime they can imagine, and I think it has a lot more force that way.
As to the question of whether these absences haunt me, I’d say that usually I do have an answer in my head where the gaps are concerned, but I wouldn’t say that this answer is any more valid than the answer that any particular reader might come up with for themselves.

Are there stories in this collection that have been particularly difficult to write? What are the difficulties that certain stories pose for a writer? How long do you ‘live’ with a story for? Do you have a pattern or does each story vary?

I’d say that almost all of them were difficult to write, and the ones that weren’t I’d feel very distrustful of. ‘Free’, for example, came to me fully-formed in a half-dream as I lay in bed early one morning. I wrote it later that afternoon just to see if it could stand as a story. The whole process seemed much too easy – for a long while I couldn’t really accept it as a valid piece of work. Somehow, without the toil and torment it didn’t seem worthy. I wish more stories came to me like that!
Unfortunately, the reality is that I’m an extremely slow and painstaking writer. Sometimes this is because a story involves a lot of research, particularly the historical ones, but even when no research is required, I’m just very, very slow, and probably average about six months per story, although there are some that I’ll ‘live’ with for years before I feel I understand them enough to know what the story is about.
I’m also a very undisiciplined writer and don’t really have any pattern to how I write or to where I find my inspiration. I tend to have several stories on the go at once, so that I can flit between them as the fancy takes me, and usually write many, many notes that don’t make it anywhere near the final draft. I always feel like I have to know everything about my characters and the world I’m depicting, and once I know that, the task begins of paring it all down and deciding what I’ll leave in the final story.

Does the short story form give you a certain freedom in terms of subject matter and style, and is that part of its appeal? I am thinking of the stark contrast between some stories – such as ‘Safe’ – which is a rather surreal, enigmatic tale about missing babies and a rat epidemic – and “The Party’s Getting Started” – which is a much more realist tale focusing on the simple exchange between ex-lovers – is this shift back and forth between worlds the appealing thing about writing short stories?

Yes, definitely. As I think it’s obvious from my collection, I don’t like to limit myself in any way when I write. Writing from personal experience doesn’t interest me much. It’s not why I write. Instead, I write to escape from everyday life, and use my imagination as a mode of transporting myself to new places and imagining what it might feel like to be someone else. I’m fickle, which I think is partly why I keep so many stories on the go at one time. As I mentioned, it means that I can jump between worlds on a whim. As a first book, I can’t imagine a better apprenticeship than a collection of stories because it allowed me so much scope for experimentation. The idea of writing a novel and having to live with the same characters and world for years on end is quite daunting to me.

For me, reading the collection is like listening to several different pieces of music, for there seems to be an atmosphere imbued in your stories that is similar to that conjured by an unknown piece of music; that haunts subtly, rhythmically, and that keeps repeating its pattern on the memory. Does music feature in your narrative world, and is it an influence in your short stories? Is it possible that writing a collection of short stories is a little like writing an album? Is the musicality of prose something that concerns you as you write?

That’s interesting you say that. While I was writing the collection I was worried the stories would be too eclectic and they wouldn’t hang together as a whole. It was only when it was finished that I started to identify themes and subject matter that recurred through the stories, quite subconsciously on my part. At first it was a little disconcerting, as if some inner part of me was being put on display. But I guess it is a little akin to a musical refrain that keeps recurring, and I think it helps to draw the stories together as a body of work.
In terms of music, yes, music was very influential to the book. A number of the stories were directly inspired by the music I was listening to. I started thinking about the title story, for example, while listening to a Dirty Three song. Often I’ll consciously choose music that seems to fit the mood of the story. I played John Fahey constantly, for example, while writing ‘Folks Like Us’, Bach sonatas while I wrote ‘Slow Billows the Smoke’, tons of old 60s British folk music while writing ‘The Numbers’…the list goes on. I did have this idea at one point that I wanted to have a CD that could come with the book, so you could listen along while reading, but logistically that would probably have been impossible.
But yes, compiling the stories was probably somewhat like writing an album, or at least a lot like making a mix-tape. The file on my computer where I played around with the ordering of the stories was even called ‘Track Listing’. When I was finally arranging the stories, I spent a lot of time working out the transition between one story to the next, just as you would when you make a mix-tape. I finally decided it was ready when it felt like the end line of one story could only possibly be followed by the beginning line of another.
I suppose the musicality of the prose is something that is important to me, yes. I spend a lot of time making sure that the sentences “sound” right, that the balance is correct, which I guess is a bit like composing. For this reason I talk out loud to myself a lot when I write, reading over the sentences to hear the sound of them, which makes it very awkward if I’m writing in a library or somewhere public.

What are you writing next? Do you intend to keep writing stories or are you planning to write a novel?

Yes, I’m still writing stories, and hope to bring them together into another collection. I’m extremely lucky in having that rare sort of editor who continues to encourage me to write more stories, so I’m happy to oblige. While I was writing the book, I also wrote a novella which I finished in first draft, and I plan to turn back to that one day. I have a few future projects in my mind which are probably larger than story length – novel-length maybe, but we’ll see. I also have another idea that I think would work well as a screenplay, but I’ve never written a screenplay before so I’d have to try to work out how that’s done.
I’ve also just finished a children’s picture book for Walker Books. So, ridiculous as this might sound, my next book will be about a Chihuahua!