We asked our Bridge Prize jurors, past and present, all writers at various stages of their literary careers, two questions:
Thinking back to early in your writing career, what piece of advice do you wish someone had shared with you that would have better prepared you for your career as a writer?
What is makes for a great short story? Or, put another way, what should witers really focus on for this specific genre?
Charlie Demers – Bridge Prize Juror 2020
Vancouver, British Columbia
Advice
I wish someone had pulled me aside and told me, until they were certain that I'd really heard it, that the only two things that matter are also the only two things you have any control over: the reading you do and the writing you do. Everything else – buzz, deals, popularity, career trajectory, online presence, networking, whatever – is not only superfluous, it's poison.
Short story focus
Hot sauce is great, but you can't have a plate of hot sauce for dinner. There are exciting things you can do with prose that nevertheless become grating or irritating or alienating for the reader in a book-length work. But in a piece of short fiction, I think the author has much more leeway to get wild…there's a reason that punk rock musicians write two-minute songs rather than symphonies, I think short story writers have the freedom to break some windows, because no one is going to be stuck in the resulting cold draft for too long.
Sheena Kamal – Bridge Prize Juror 2024
Advice
It's a journey, not a sprint. And at the end of the day, it's your communion with what's on the page that matters.
Short story focus
With a short story you've got to get into the voice right away, and that comes from experience. Write as much as you can, and you'll find that accessing your writing voice becomes easier over time.
Lisa Moore – Bridge Prize Juror in 2022
St. John’s Newfoundland & Labrador
Advice
Recognize that literature is a living beast, chimerical, always changing, becoming new, and newer still, stories giving birth to stories, fast as rabbits, and the beast flicks its powerful tail and flies, skates, gallops and sails and one has to read and read and read and write and rewrite and write just to get a hold of that tail and hang on for dear life.
Short story focus
Listen to the way people speak, the things that go unsaid, the way they move, gestures, expressions, strides, gaits, how they smell, the texture of the language they use, verbal and non-verbal; notice the kind of agency a character has in society, and the action of society as it shapes a character – these things make the story felt or lived through.
George Murray – Bridge Prize Juror in 2024
St. John’s Newfoundland & Labrador
Advice
There is no rush to publish. There is time for that later. Most writers don't receive their first publications until midlife. The goal when you start writing should be to read as much as possible, practice making art that captures the essence of the creative moment you had in your head, and to figure out what you like to read and therefore what you should write. Publishing is the business part that happens after the art part of writing is done. When you're young, you should concentrate on improving the art, not the business.
Short story focus A great short story does in 20 to 30 pages what an entire novel does in 300. That doesn't mean that it covers that much plot, but rather that the reader is left with a sense of a fully-developed world with fully-developed characters. Alice Munro does this in every story, which is what makes her a master. George Saunders does as well. Lori Moore, Denis Johnson, Jumpa Lahiri, Zsuzsi Gartner, Nalo Hopkinson, etc. These are writers whose stories will leave you with the intellectual and emotional weight of a novel, but in 1/10th the pages. That said, what they do takes years of practice. New writers should concentrate on setting, character, and plot. Making their characters real, with real flaws, and facing real choices, and with real conflicts between them, will be most important to my mind.
Danny Ramadan – Bridge Prize Juror 2024
Vancouver, British Columbia
Advice
I wish someone had told me to be kind to my writing. There are so many stories that I never told because I had a judgemental voice in my head telling me they are not good enough, or not creative enough, or not innovative enough. Now, looking back, I realize that we need to go through the mundane and cliché as authors for us to be able to write the innovative and creative. In a way, we needed to learn how to walk before we take on a ballroom dance.
Short story focus
Short story writing is truly about being able to trim away the excess and focus on the essence. Every short story is, in a way, a snippet into the life of the characters we focus on. Being able to zoom in onto one specific detail and expand it to allow for an authentic representation of our character requires a strong hand and an editing eye. When you find the wound of your character, and what drives them through the pages of a short story, you should be able to disregard the uninspiring narratives and replace it with meaningful storytelling.
Waubgeshig Rice – Bridge Prize Juror 2022
Sudbury, Ontario
Advice
Early in my career I wish I had a better understanding of the publishing industry and how to navigate it. Don’t hesitate to reach out to experienced published authors for industry guidance!
Short story focus
Writers should consider how oral storytelling can influence and help create great written short stories. Everyone is a storyteller, and we speak stories to others regularly, so it’s important to try to harness those fundamentals in our writing.
Joan Thomas – Bridge Prize Juror 2022
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Advice
I honestly never thought I’d be a writer because I was raised in an ideology that aimed to shut out mainstream culture. The fiction I love is rich and quick with off-hand contemporary references, and I felt as though I’d never catch up to the world enough to write like that. But eventually I came to see that being an outsider is invaluable to a writer. My advice comes down to this: embrace your unique perspective on the world. Write the story that only you can write.
Short story focus
Short stories are wonderful for peeling back small encounters and revealing their meaning. The best short stories, in my view, set those small epiphanies in the context of our messy, precarious, high-stakes world. A novel can feel heavy-handed when it takes on big subjects, but short fiction lends itself to the lighting-bright moments when the fabric of consensual reality rips open, and readers see the world differently.
Sam Wiebe – Bridge Prize Juror 2022
Vancouver, British Columbia
Advice
Everyone starts on insufficient knowledge.
Short story focus
No wasted sentences – every sentence should reveal character or propel the story.