SYNOPSIS (Story Development)

A Needle in the Heart (Vintage)

The long story form interests me a great deal. Chekhov was the great master, to whom I return again and again, just to see how he constructed his stories and maintained such delicate tension throughout them ("The Kiss" is my favourite). The Canadian writer Alice Munro has refined this technique wonderfully well in her contemporary stories. I marvel at the way she conveys whole life stories in narratives that take perhaps an hour to read. I've worked in this form on and off since the early 1980s, and last year published a whole collection of stories that range from 7,000 words to 20,000. Each story explores a moment of great change in a woman's life.