"Sfîrșitul nopții" (The End of Night), the Beginning of Short Stories
On Sunday morning I finished reading a book. Sunday evening I was again hungry for books. That’s how I am - I don’t feel right if I don’t have a book with me everywhere. I needed something to keep me until Thursday evening when my parents come to visit and I get Arheologia Iubirii (The Archeology of Love). I was looking through the books waiting to be read and I remember that last year I bought three books written by Petronela Rotar - alive, Sfîrșitul nopții (The End of Night) and O să mă știi de undeva (You’ll know me from somewhere). Perfect, I’ll definitely have enough time to read at least one of them - I know the effect Petronela’s books have on myself. I chose Sfîrșitul nopții (The End of Night) because it is a collection of short stories and I was thinking there will be no problem if I don’t finish it all. Today is Tuesday and I finished the book. I don’t know what I’ll do until Thursday.
I think this is the first time I read short stories in Romanian. Until I found Petronela’s collection, honestly, I didn’t even know there were any Romanian short stories. I wrote about it a while ago, I asked for suggestions. No one - nothing. My proposal remains open - if anyone knows any Romanian short stories, I want to devour them all.
I recently fell in love with short stories. In October when I started uni, to be more specific. I have a course dedicated to this - case studies in short fiction. Until then, my brain made a weird (but somehow understandable) between short stories and literature for children. In October I started reading texts of at most 10 pages about discrimination, feminism, psychology, consumerism and even politics or religion. A few pages messed me up worse than fat and healthy novels. How was that possible?
How was that possible? I mean, wait a minute… you don’t have to write books of hundreds of pages to call yourself a writer? Can you do it with little simple (yet complex) stories?
I did not dare to answer my questions until a few hours ago when I managed to unglue myself from Petronela’s book. Whatever I didn’t willingly unglue myself, but there were no more pages left.
In these 19 stories, each of a few pages, lay hidden complex stories, with complex characters. Stories that could go on for hundreds of pages, but still they don’t. They are simple episodes in the lives of some people. That was all to be said about them. And I can’t believe you can do this as a writer - tell what happened and only that, end it and go on to another episode in the life of other characters.
I was fascinated by the way every story is built. Stream of consciousness uninterrupted by dialogue lines (all interventions are paragraphs on their own) look so pretty on paper. I always believed that marking dialogue breaks the flow of a narrative - I’m not sure why. Stories end when they have to end - when the conflict is solved or with the suggestion of a solution. Most of them have an open ending, but that was all to be said.
That’s it, Petronela has her charm, the end. All that I can do is wish to have my own charm as a writer.
Anyway, her book turned my life around 180°.
Until now I lived convinced that whatever you write needs to be at least 50 pages long. I have dozens of ideas gathering dust in a notebook waiting for me to figure out how to make 50 pages out of them. They’re all ideas that can be developed in maximum 10 pages in which I present an episode and there’s nothing else to be said afterwards. I had no idea how to make them begin with a beginning and end with an ending.
I was afraid I’ll never have an idea to write in 300 pages. I was living with this fear behind me and I heard her every time I was putting an idea on paper. It’s not good enough. You can’t even make a novella out of it. But now I understand I don’t even have to. It’s enough for a story to begin and end where I feel it should. If I am to write 5 pages, 50 or 500, that’s something else. I’m sure that one day I’ll sit down to write and I’ll write and I’ll write and I’ll keep on writing until a novel comes out.
Until then, it’s time to dust off my ideas and make short stories out of them. Because short stories are also literature, and in literature, we’re talking about quality, not quantity.
I don’t know whether it is a coincidence that this revelation hit me on International Writer’s Day - I discovered on Facebook that it’s today - or a sign. We’ll see.
Have an inspired writer’s day!
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