In a short story, every word counts. No waffle, no flab. But there’s freedom in there, too. A short story is a holiday romance: we know it won’t last, and we don’t care, and that frees us up to take chances. Susie Day, author of the Pea’s Book series and The Twice-Lived Summer of Bluebell Jones , talks about the joys of writing short stories for a new anthology, Love Hurts

One day, when I am trapped on a wifi-less desert island with nothing else to do but fashion yet another itchy coconut bra, I will finally crack the spine on Proust’s À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu: all 3000 pages of it. But until then, there are too many books pleading for my attention. Ones I can hold in the bath. Maybe 10 distinct imagined worlds, not one. Sorry, Marcel, but tomes are off the table. The shorter the better.



As a kid, I hoovered up Pippi Longstocking and Mrs Pepperpot. As a young adult, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were my perfect between-essays treat. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is as potent as any novel I read as a teenager. And, of course, the first stories I made up myself were short ones.

As a writer, part of the appeal for me is the formal challenge: creating characters, a complete miniature world, tone and voice, plot, in such a small space. Every word counts. No waffle, no flab.

But there’s freedom in there, too. A novel is a big investment for a writer: six months, a year, longer, in the company of our imaginary friends. We carry them around with us while we plot and plan and revise, in supermarket queues, in the shower, as we fall asleep. Some of my longest relationships have been with fictional humans. To pull that off, we have to love our books – even if the love grows to be less kissyfaced joy, more comfy-shoes-I-hate-the-way-you-eat-cornflakes-but-you-put-the-bins-out-and-well-we’ve-come-this-far-I-suppose-we-might-as-well-stick-it-out-ugh-marmite-breath-no-it’s-fine-I-love-you-too. A short story is a holiday romance. We know it won’t last, and we don’t care. There is a sharpness, an urgency, in-built. In screenwriting, setting a “timelock” is encouraged, a clever trick to raise the stakes. In a short story, that comes for free.

Some ideas just aren’t novel-sized. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty doesn’t stretch (as evidenced by the Jim Carrey film). My Love Hurts short, Tumbling, is one I’d never have pitched as a longer book. The tale of two BBC Sherlock fangirls meeting for the first time, hoping they might be more than friends, isn’t only a sweet first-date vignette; it’s a slice of internet life, filled with in-jokes and nerdery. If it wasn’t for the runaway success of Rainbow Rowell’s glorious Fangirl last year, I’d probably never have dared to write it at all.

Why love hurts – and it's always worth it Read more

It’s not going to be for everyone. That’s fine, because the people it is for have, like, NO stories. If this story is for you, it will light you up. And if it isn’t, no harm done, here’s another one: like Catherine Johnson’s brilliant breathless The Liar’s Girl, a twisty historical London romance with a cracking ending; like James Dawson’s The Unicorn, a mournful yet uplifting reflection on a doomed love affair; like Laura Dockrill’s thoughtful, optimistic Gentlewoman. No one begins reading an anthology assuming they’ll like each piece equally – and that’s a blissful thing for an author to know. It frees us up to take chances. It lets us run into the wonkier corners of our imaginations. We get to play.

And as readers, anthologies like Love Hurts let us play too. UKYA authors are writing the most innovative, diverse, engaging stories – but as SF Said recently noted in these pages, “media coverage of children’s books is vanishingly small”. In the absence of a mainstream reviewing culture, it can be hard to know where to start. An anthology like Love Hurts, with its mix of original shorts and extracts from novels, is the perfect way for newbies to dip a toe into YA and discover why Malorie Blackman, Patrick Ness, Bali Rai et al are so beloved; for regular readers to challenge and broaden their tastes; for avid fans to treat themselves in the wait between books.

More great YA anthologies:

1. Losing It – original contemporary stories from Patrick Ness, Jenny Valentine, Sophie MacKenzie and many more on the subject of that first time.

2. And Then He Kissed Me – nine bittersweet romances featuring UKYA and YAIE authors Joanna Nadin, Sarah Webb, Adele Parks, Cathy Kelly.

3. Daughters of Time – inspiring fiction drawn from history’s powerful women, from Boudicca to Mary Seacole to Greenham Common – featuring Mary Hoffman, Celia Rees, Catherine Johnson and more. (Read a review by site member Helloitsheath here.)

4. War Girls – nine exclusive stories inspired by the real lives of young women during the first world war, including Sally Nicholls, Adele Geras, Melvin Burgess. (Read reviews by site members CaraErica here and Sophie Scribe here.)

5. Twisted Winter – seven sinister tales for chill winter nights, from the likes of Susan Cooper, Frances Hardinge and Katherine Langrish.

6. The Great War – short pieces inspired by real objects from a soldier’s writing case to the nose of a Zeppelin bomb, featuring Sheena Wilkinson, Michael Morpurgo, David Almond and more, in a beautiful book illustrated by Jim Kay.

7. Next? – the afterlife confronted: edited by Keith Gray, bringing together Malorie Blackman, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Gillian Philip

8. And for younger teens, Girls Heart Christmas: diverse, kind, surprising, with stories from Jo Cotterill, Julie Sykes, Luisa Plaja and many more

Love Hurts is this month’s Teen Book Club read – find out more here.