About Patrick Cullen’s short story ‘How to Read a Short Story: A 12-Step Program’

This story was first published in Wet Ink (Issue 20, September 2010), and was later used as a starting point for an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald in which Jane Sullivan contrasts my recommendation to savour individual stories with a reflection on her own tendency to move directly from one to another.

Below is the first draft of ‘How to Read a Short Story: A 12-Step Program’. This draft took less than a minute, which leaves the handwriting little more than the transcription of brainwaves, but the rewrite took several weeks.

I see reference to Paul Rudnick’s ‘How to read a one act play’ but recall that this story was more a response to Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘How to write a short story’.

Then it’s:

“1. (Make yourself comfortable) Do everything else that you think might need doing.”

“2. Make yourself coffee[?].”

“3. Thumb through the book in reverse, feel the light weight of breeze on your lips . . . open the book to the contents page, calculate which story is the shortest . . . Begin reading . . . Flick ahead to . . . .”

“4. If its: RC [Raymond Carver] from the Lish years [expect it {indecipherable}] . . . Alice Munro [that’s all] . . . Chekhov [try to recall gender?] . . . Updike [wait for something to happen?] . . . .”

Read more short stories by Patrick Cullen