Vintage Tales is a series of new short story collections by Canadian writers. Here, we gather together three of those extraordinary authors to discuss the craft of short story writing. Just like the clever and compact tales they are known to write, Timothy Taylor, Shaena Lambert and Rabindranath Maharaj meditate on an art form that is alive and well.

The short story is a famously difficult form. The young writer is routinely warned: This is much harder than it looks. Which is fair enough. Tales resist compression. We tend, as a species (and surely writers especially) to inefficiency. And yet, difficult and unnatural as it may be, the short story offers a singular freedom. Let me dwell, speaking as a writer, and only for a moment, on this under-celebrated quality. It cannot be denied that the conception and writing of a novel, even in rough first draft, is an undertaking that exceeds in scope what is possible to accomplish in any single period of wakefulness. (I exclude 24-hour novel-writing contests as well as On the Road and other writing projects involving the use of benzedrine.) Short stories, by contrast, may be conceived and, if not drafted, then mentally framed, all in the instant. In the unpredictable internal silences that suspend the ordinary day. In the time it takes to cross town by bus when traffic is slowed by a hail storm. In the time it takes to finish a bowl of katsu don when a task is being avoided. In the time it takes your heartbeat to slow after hearing bad news by phone. These moments, wherein the self is momentarily blank, are sometimes all that is required to bring a short story to life. Salman Rushdie has written: “literature is the art least subject to external control, because it is made in private.” He was speaking, quite rightly, about the power and freedom of the novel. The same might be said of the short story, only more so in the sense that, while it too comes to life in private, it may well evade even your own controls.

When you are writing a short story, falling into a new place can feel like falling down a well. The first time it happens by accident. You curse the dark. Curse the lost hours you’ll have to spend, scrambling out. But after a while you realize that falling down a well may be precisely how you find the best material.

It may be what you’re supposed to be doing.

It may, in fact, be your profession.

Although it may be tempting to write a short-story plan, any plan I have ever written has had to be thrown out in favour of something else that arrives on its own. This can, of course, be frustrating. After all, many story ideas come with a shiver of excitement. Then one works diligently, for days, for weeks, hammering out drafts. If a story puts out new shoots, it can be tempting to snap them off.

But by adhering too closely to what a story should be doing, you could end up stuck: obsessively re-working the first paragraph, for instance, or opening the whole story file with dread. After a while, the thing that glimmered in its Platonic Form could lie across your desk like a strange (and, naturally, unwanted) corpse.

Writing short stories is a craft — but one you do with half-shut eyes. Rather than being hard work, or only hard work, it is more like trapping chipmunks (something my son did while camping — using a net, a pot and some string). You have to lie in wait and be patient. You have to pretend to be doing something else.

Jorge Luis Borges describes this process in his brilliant short story, “The Circular Ruins.” In it, a magician withdraws into the jungle, his goal being to dream a man into existence. The magician dreams meticulously — picturing the man’s sallow face and rebellious character, even imagining his reluctance to exist. But still the dreamed-of man won’t materialize. Months go by, then years (during which the magician forgets how to dream, then remembers again). Then one night the magician sees a heart floating above him. Blood flows through the pulmonary artery. It beats . . .

Borges’ story describes the complexities of short-story writing perfectly. The writer starts by dreaming the outer aspects —that may be all that he can do. But if he is lucky, and vigilant —and perhaps even slightly forgetful — one day a heart may appear on its own.

When I was writing my first novel, Homer in Flight, I imagined that my apprenticeship was complete and that I would no longer write short stories. A collection of stories had just been published. The stories were written quickly, a benefit, I believe, of my relocation from Trinidad to New Brunswick. I had arrived in fall, and was immediately overwhelmed by scenes I had previously only witnessed in National Geographic magazines. Everything was fresh and new and peculiar. I was curious and confused; the book of stories was written in four months. When I was writing my first novel, Homer in Flight, I imagined that my apprenticeship was complete and that I would no longer write short stories. A collection of stories had just been published. The stories were written quickly, a benefit, I believe, of my relocation from Trinidad to New Brunswick. I had arrived in fall, and was immediately overwhelmed by scenes I had previously only witnessed in National Geographic magazines. Everything was fresh and new and peculiar. I was curious and confused; the book of stories was written in four months.

A short story, requiring only a minor commitment, is easy to write. It comes complete with a beginning and a conclusion, with defined characters, and a reliable landscape. It’s completed in a few nights, too short a period for doubts, concerns, and significant revision. It’s usually locked onto a critical event, some momentous event in a person’s life. For me, there are set priorities; characterization is usually more important than setting, atmosphere more meaningful than strict chronology. When I begin a short story, I know all the little diversions the plot might take, all the tricks the characters might try. One of the biggest differences to me, between a short story and a novel, is that stories are sparked by recent observations — a brazen courtship, the sly indifference of a salesperson, the expression on a woman’s face as she recounts some act of betrayal, an old immigrant struggling in his bulky winter clothing.

Recently, I’ve started writing in a small coffee-shop in Ajax. The disparate energy, the fragmented conversations sliced by laughter, helps rather than hinders my concentration. I cannot really explain this. Occasionally, I look up to gaze at the odd gestures of a mismatched couple, or I listen to a surreptitious conversation, and I think that versions of these hurried observations might emerge in a short story in a few months, or in a novel, ten or fifteen years later on.