On What Makes Beautiful Fiction

I want every word to be unexpected when I read. I want to hear the voice, I want to taste, feel, smell, and see the world of the story. It’s great if there’s some humour. I want to be engaged emotionally. I’m looking for strong characters. And the ending has to be inevitable and unexpected. I think short stories can do the work of novels, only faster.
Characters have to change, go through something altering. I want my world to slip away, and I want to be surprised, when I finish reading, to see that I’m still sitting on my own sofa and my rooster coffee cup is still cradled in my lap, coffee gone cold.

I really enjoyed reading the shortlisted stories. Every one made me think: Oh, this is the winner—they’re all so different. And “The Dead Dad Game” gripped me from the beginning. Strong characters, humour, big emotions, all beautifully rendered. This story was about people who are out of the ordinary, but thoroughly authentic and convincing. The writing is sensual and vivid. There’s humour in it and also deep sadness.

I loved despising the narrator in “Something Fierce”: sexist, drunk and profoundly full of himself, this narrator is someone I’ve met a thousand times in real life but haven’t seen made quite so flesh-and-blood-present in fiction before. How concrete the slurred and soft-walled world of the setting is here. A bar full of drunken academics. A wicked sort of
satire.

The language in “Mama Dglo’s Lullaby” is unexpected and electric—a story about childhood friendship, class, magic, girl power and it brings the Caribbean to life on the page. This story is music.

Lisa Moore is the author of two collections of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open, and the novel, Alligator. She recently selected and introduced the Penguin Anthology of Short Fiction by Canadian Women and co-edited with Dede Crane Great Expectation: 24 True Stories About Birth. Both Alligator and Open were nominated for the Giller Prize and Alligator won The Commonwealth Prize for the Canadian Caribbean Region. Lisa’s most recent novel, February, is forthcoming in June 2009.