SYNOPSIS (Story Development)

The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (Vintage)

'Sometime in the mid 1960's I began to write short stories. With youthful enthusiasm and, I see, looking back, only a limited expression of the form, I wrote them as practice for the longer undertaking of a novel. It was not long before I began to write them in earnest, for their own sake. In those early days, I wrote everything with a passionate abandon which now looks like the work of another person.
…..People often ask how the decision is made to write a short story rather than a novel. I find this hard to answer. Stories come to me whole, like poems, so there never seems to be a major problem to solve. You listen to a story in your head, and it has a sort of musical intonation, something that tells you that this is its shape. And then you do it. I've never written a short story that turned out to be a novel…Writing short stories remains the purest form of creative pleasure for me.'

(from "Introduction" to The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories)