No one knows exactly where the finish line is in a short story competition – except according to the stories that got over it. The sample is usually small and the criteria qualitative. What is surprising then is that one can spot trends or tendencies at all.
In November 2019, we announced a spontaneous short story competition, on a short leash – the deadline was just two weeks away. We thought it would be nice when we launched our new site in the new year, to give Southasian fiction an early and prominent place on it. Our Himal-stalwart colleagues told us to expect around 60 entries. We got 319. Some writers even told us they'd quickly written a story to submit. Six members of the Himal editorial team – all of us in fact – were drafted to discuss and decide.
We were right and proper about our criteria – nothing prejudged; form and content prized reciprocally, not alone; a readiness to argue equally for perfect polishes and imperfect experiments; bravery noted; questions of taste acknowledged but submitted to thoughtful scrutiny. All as you would expect – an insistence that we knew why we were choosing the stories we chose to highlight. It is considerable tribute to the shortlisted stories that they did get over an exacting imaginary line and no discredit either to those that did not, this time.
At the longlisting stage every story was read by two people, at shortlisting stage, by all six of us. As we read in different corners of our office, we sometimes called out to each other repeated features we'd noticed across stories, often finding others had come across them too. One of our editors commented that in the process of reading the stories she learnt to spot familiar pitfalls in her own writing. Here follows an irregular and incomplete list of questions, clichés, curiosities, challenges and reflections that arose from our reading, all gathered in a spirit of self-reflection on our storytelling habits, grateful to 319 writers who made us think.