A Personal Anthology, by Vicky Grut

For this selection, I’ve chosen stories that contradict the creative writing maxim: Show DON’T tell. It’s true that inexperienced writers can be tempted to overload their stories with exposition and explanation. But it’s equally tedious when they are so terrified of being accused of ‘telling’ that they dramatize absolutely everything in long oblique scenes. At its best, telling brings energy. It allows the writer to grab hold of a story, to move rapidly through time, to work directly with voice, and to play games with older forms of storytelling like fairytales and myths (Angela Carter’s 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber being a wonderful example of that). Two of the two stories in this selection work with negatives: telling the reader what a character has forgotten, or what people don’t want to know.

‘Infinite Husbands’ by Claire Carroll (First published in The London Magazine and available to read here. Collected in The Unreliable Nature Writer, Scratch Books, 2024)

This debut collection contains many examples of what a writer can do when she’s not afraid to play around with telling. ‘Infinite Husbands’ is one of my favourites:

“My second husband is hilarious and cruel and devastatingly handsome, with watery blue eyes. He is so handsome that I can’t even think about him for too long as my heart rate rises unbearably, and I have to lie down. He has been missing for quite some time.”

The show-don’t-tell police would be all over this with a red pen: Don’t tell us that he’s ‘hilarious’, ‘cruel’, ‘handsome’! Dramatize these qualities! Show us how he behaves towards the narrator so that we can draw our own conclusions. Use unusual verbs! But that would take all day, and it’s not what the story is interested in.

Many of the narrators in this collection are – as the title suggests – not entirely trustworthy.

‘The Man on the Stairs’ by Miranda July (First published in Fence.com and available to read here. Collected in No One Belongs Here More than You, Canongate, 2007)

Miranda July is the queen of unreliable narrations, and this is one of my favourites. A young woman lies awake in bed listening to the creak of footsteps in the dead hours of the night, convinced that she and her slumbering boyfriend are about to be murdered by a stranger: “He had all the time in the world for this, my god did he have time. I have never taken such care with anything.”

While she waits to meet her death, the narrator chews over various failings and disappointments in her life: her boyfriend (whom she stalked obsessively for years); her inadequately interesting friends; her own many shortcomings. What powers the story is the self-aware, neurotically comic voice. You could argue that because of the subtext, the writer is ‘showing’ as much as ‘telling’. Perhaps good telling always manages to do both.

‘Little Sister’ by Anne Enright (First published in Granta 75, Autumn 2001, and available to read online here [where, intriguingly or confusingly, it’s listed under Essay & Memoir – Ed.]. Collected in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008 and Yesterday’s Weather, Penguin 2017)

An older sister roams back and forth in time, recalling various incidents from their shared childhood and youth, trying to understand the reasons for her younger sister’s death. She makes challenging statements like “anorexia was just starting then”, and “none of us liked my father, except Serena who was a little flirt from an early age”. Enright has an extraordinary ability to change focus. She describes the intimacy of a kiss where “All the sadness welled up into my face and into my lips”, and in the very next sentence she has zoomed right back out: “We went out for a while as if we hoped something good could come of it all.” The story is only eight pages long, but it becomes like a reel of cotton running away from the writer: “I am trying to stop this story, but it just won’t end.” The narrative voice is bitter as gall.

‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid (First published in the New Yorker in June 1978 and available to subscribers to read here)

This is another voice-driven story in which a mother harangues her daughter about how to behave. It’s not a realistic scene, but rather a collection of many moments from a mother-daughter relationship as the girl begins to move from childhood to adolescence. The mother is fierce and threatening: “on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.” But we begin to see that she is trying to warn her daughter, to protect her from hardships she herself has suffered. Indirectly, we can’t help piecing together a picture of a wider village community: recipes, superstitions, prejudices, traditions and fears. The girl tries to object but the mother ploughs on.

‘The Gospel According to Mark’ by Jorge Luis Borges (First published in English, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author, in the New Yorker, October 1971, and collected in Doctor Brodie’s Report, Dutton, 1972, and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998/Penguin, 2000, where it is translated by Andrew Hurley. Read it online at the New Yorker here; or hear it read by Paul Theroux here)

As with many of his stories Borges begins as if this is something taken from the archives – “These events took place at La Colorada ranch, in the southern part of the township of Junín, during the last days of March, 1928” – though of course we know it’s pure fiction. The first page sketches the background and personality of Espinosa, a young man of “with nothing more noteworthy about him than an almost unlimited kindness and a capacity for public speaking that had earned him several prizes at the English school in Ramos Mejía.” Espinosa ends up trapped by floods on a friend’s farm, his only companions being the farm foreman Gutres and Gutres’s son and daughter. Good-natured and condescending, the young visitor decides to take it upon himself to educate the Gutres by reading to them from the Bible, with disastrous results. The ending is truly stunning. A breathtakingly ironic story about class, belief and unintended consequences.

‘Our Lady of the Quarry’ by Mariana Enriques, tr. Megan McDowell (First published in English in The New Yorker, December 2020, available to read here. Collected in the UK in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Granta 2021)

This story is unusual in that it’s told in the first-person plural: we. A group of teenage girls hang out with a slightly older girl, Sylvia, whom they both admire and hate. “If we discovered a new drug she had already overdosed on the same substance. If we discovered a band we liked, she had already got over her fandom of the same group.” When Sylvia takes up with a young man they all fancy it becomes a horror story, a kind of Argentine Carrie. Enriques is brilliant at evoking the inchoate power of adolescent female sexuality.

‘The Husband Stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado (First published online in Granta in 2014 and available to read here. Collected in Her Body And Other Parties, Graywolf/Serpent’s Tail, 2019)

I’m not the first to pick this story, nor will I be the last. It’s earthy and visceral, sometimes sweet, sometimes horrific, written in an incantatory first-person voice that pauses every now and then to instruct the reader on how to achieve the right sound effects or what pitch of voice to use when reading aloud. The narrator tells us that as a little girl she was sure she saw bloody toes for sale in the supermarket: “As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world only observed by a single set of eyes. As a girl, I consented to his account of the story.”

‘Be a Woman, Be Yourself, Be Miserable’ by Sheila Heti (First published in the UK as part of Alphabetical Diaries, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Feb 2024. Available to read online at Electric Literaturehere)

Strictly speaking, this is a novel extract rather than a short story, but this section – the letter B – was published online as a self-contained piece so I think it counts. Drawn from more than ten years of diary entries, Heti’s novel is a compilation of sentences from different times cut up and re-arranged in alphabetical order (via an excel spreadsheet, her publishers tell us). The writing veers from lofty reflections on morality and art to comments about buying orange juice or enjoying pierogis. There are snippets about relationships with several different men, which frustrates the impulse to find a single narrative thread, and yet there is definitely a shape here. The piece begins with short, snappy exhortations: “Be impeccable with your word. Be miserable about the world.” Towards the end it’s more about growing old and dying. It feels mysterious. Not everyone can pull this kind of thing off, but I think Heti does.

‘The Twelfth of Never’ by Gurnaik Johal (First published in We Move, Serpent’s Tail, 2022)

Unlike most narratives this one isn’t linked by characters or setting. It skips through time from one year to the next, beginning in 1741 and ending in 2020. Each snippet of the story is very brief. We hardly have time to get to know these people, before we are hurtling onwards through decades to the next fragment. The story begins with a butcher’s wife and ends with an old song discovered on Spotify. Like a puzzle, you can’t help searching for a pattern, a connecting thread. In the end you realise it’s about music. It’s the scale of the narrative that stays with you in the end.

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff (First published in The New Yorker, September 1995 and available to read here; collected in The Night in Question, Knopf / Picador, 1996)

This story has been picked by several other anthologists, but I can’t leave it out because it’s such a great example of how to use both showing AND telling. To begin with it seems as if we’re in a close-third-person narrative, following Anders, a burned out and cynical literary critic as he stands in a queue at his local bank. In the middle of the story there is a crisis that shouldn’t come as a surprise but does, and at this point the story makes an extraordinary switch, and we realise that we’re in the hands of a highly skilled omniscient narrator. Wolff describes the trajectory of the bullet through the soft tissue of the brain and at the same time takes us on a rapid tour through Anders’ life by listing all the significant emotional moments he has forgotten.

‘Stories I Can’t Tell Anyone I Know’ by Bhanu Kapil (First published in Prototype 5, reprinted in Best British Short Stories, Salt, 2024)

This story is only three pages long, a collection of eight enigmatic mini narratives. Here are some examples of the way some of them begin: “A young woman lives alone on an island. […] There’s a reason she chooses to live this way.” “A man approaches a girl of about twelve as she’s waiting for the school bus.” “A nineteen-year-old man falls in love with a man who lives as a woman.” The title does a lot of heavy lifting: right from the start we know that these stories cannot be freely shared. Nothing is overtly spelled out but there is a strong undertow of pain, regret and shame. Indirectly, the writer describes her community by telling us what people around her do not want to hear about.

‘Beginning End’ by Jessica Soffer (First published online in 2009 as one of Granta magazine’s New Voices and free to read here)

My final choice is an incredibly short story, just 725 words, that first opened my eyes to the power of telling. Moving between three modes of address – you, I and we – it takes the reader flying through many decades of a relationship between an unnamed man and woman. Each paragraph narrates a new phase in their lives: “We got a place. We read a lot. We rescued a dog. You worked at a shelter. I was a terrible handyman. My father called friends. We moved to the city.” The key to its brilliance is the way the writer strings together statements that conjure concrete images in the reader’s mind, so that the story is almost like flicking though a photo album. That, for me, is the secret of all good writing, whether you’re showing or telling.

* Vicky Grut’s collection Live Show, Drink Included was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize in 2019. Individual stories have been published in anthologies and collections including Harvard Review and Best British Short Stories. She has work forthcoming in The Masters Review XIII in the States in Spring 2025. She lives in London. Website: www.vickygrut.com

* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 3,000 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com.

* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall (Galley Beggar, 2014, and forthcoming in the US from Tivoli Books, 2025), and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He teaches on the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.

* And if you are interested in contributing your own Personal Anthology to the project, then please let me know by replying to this email. I’m always on the lookout for guest editors!

* Finally, if you enjoy this Substack you might enjoy Creative Digest, a collaborative Substack produced by the Creative Writing team at City, and to which I contribute. Read and subscribe here.