Flowers Shouldn’t Make You Cry
Keep Reading Barbara Erskine’s Novels
I have always loved reading short stories and, like many authors, tested my literary wings experimenting with them. At first glance anyway, the short story seems an easy route for the beginner, largely because it is, axiomatically, short; one is not aiming for some distant horizon two or three hundred thousand words away. Short stories are self contained, feisty, fun; they are tricky, challenging – compact crystallizations, each of which must have as much substance in its own way as its big brother, the novel.
Having started to write them, hooked by the lure of so many plots, so many characters, so many scenes and the technical challenge of construction, I have found that I cannot resist the form, and this selection is taken from the hundreds I have written over the past fifteen years.
I did not plan to be a short story writer. I wanted to be a novelist – specifically a historical novelist – and it was years ago while a student at university in Scotland that I decided to write my first novel, the story of Robert the Bruce and the woman who set the crown of Scotland on his head. Consumed with excitement as I worked on the outline, spending much more time on it than I did on my studies, I visited the sites of the story and, absorbing the atmosphere, walked alone along mist-shrouded rivers and around the remains of countless castles. I wrote several thousand words, then I stopped. I realized I couldn’t go, on. I hadn’t the experience of writing or of life to cope with the huge task I had set myself. Quietly and sadly I put my manuscript away. I knew I would write it one day – but not yet. (That book eventually became Kingdom of Shadows and, secretly, I incorporated those few thousand words unchanged into it – a debt to that student writer who had felt Robert and Isobel’s suffering but had not then been able to put it down on paper.)
My confidence was shaken. I had wanted to be a writer since I was three years old and yet I had fallen at the first major fence. It was a case of wanting to run before I could walk. Obviously I had an apprenticeship to serve and so came the idea of trying to write short stories. I studied the markets and began to write articles and stories to fit those markets. Miraculously the first story I wrote was accepted and published by the London Evening News. I was much encouraged!
It was when we went to live in the Welsh Borders that again the longing to write historical fiction grew too strong to resist and I recognized consciously for the first time that I was one of those writers for whom the spirit of place is all important. The land around me, the hills, the forests, the seas, evoke echoes I cannot ignore. I have to write about them. I have to try and make my readers see and hear and even smell the landscape and its history as I see and hear and feel it.
Once more I began to plan a novel and this time I felt I had the experience and the confidence to do it. Not the story of Robert and Isobel – I still wasn’t ready for that – but a novel of history and passion and mystery which was born of the mysterious, ancient landscape around me.
While I read and researched and visited the sites which were to become the background for Lady of Hay I went on writing short stories and, eventually, half a dozen short historical romances as well, perhaps to complete my apprenticeship before at last I could start writing the big novel.
But by now I enjoyed writing short stories too much to stop. Heavily involved in a book full of passion and hatred and fear it is nice to come up for air from time to time to write a humorous story, or an unashamedly sentimental one; a modern