Short prose
Sukh Stories will hold short prose. It is being written, and nothing has been put here in its place.
This is a site for stories rather than for articles or commentary. The collection is not yet published. What follows describes what the site is for and how it will work, which is the only thing that can honestly be said before the writing arrives.
Where this site stands today
There are no stories on this page yet. That is a plain statement of fact rather than a technique. The domain was set up some time ago and carried a template with six demonstration pieces in it, placed there by the theme rather than by anyone with something to say, and those have been removed because leaving them would have implied a body of work that does not exist.
The alternative would have been to fill the space, and the alternative was rejected. Prose published under a person's name is a claim about that person. Nobody else can make it on their behalf, and a page of competent, plausible, borrowed stories would say something untrue about the author while looking entirely respectable. An empty room is a smaller problem than a furnished lie.
So the site stands open and unfurnished. When the work is ready it will appear here, dated, one piece to a page, with nothing between the reader and the text.
What this site is for
Sukh Stories is intended for short prose: the kind of writing that carries a scene, a person or a turn of events, and stops when it has done so. It is not a blog, not a news site and not a place for professional commentary. Those things already exist elsewhere and they are a different activity, undertaken for different reasons and read in a different frame of mind.
The distinction is worth keeping because the two forms compete. Writing that argues wants to be clear, complete and defensible. Writing that tells a story is allowed to withhold, to leave a judgement unmade, and to end without a conclusion. Put both on one site and the argument tends to win, because it is easier to finish and easier to justify. Giving stories their own address is a way of protecting the slower form from the faster one.
The subject matter is not fixed in advance. Some of it will be drawn from a working life spent in education across more than one country, some from family, some invented outright. The site does not promise a theme, only that each piece will be finished before it is put up.
The form, and why short
Short prose has an unfashionable virtue: it can be read in one sitting, on a phone, in the gaps of an ordinary day, and it either works in that sitting or it does not. There is nowhere to hide. A novel can carry a weak chapter and recover. A story of a few pages that fails in its first paragraph has failed entirely, and the writer finds out quickly.
That discipline is the reason for choosing the form rather than an accident of available time. Every element has to earn its place. A character who is described but does no work will be noticed. A scene that exists to set up another scene will feel like scaffolding. The constraint does most of the editing before an editor is needed.
There is no fixed length and there will be no word count published as a target. Some pieces will run to a page and some considerably longer. The measure is whether the piece is finished, which is a different question from whether it is long.
- Short story
- A work of prose fiction complete in itself and short enough to be read in a single sitting.
- Flash fiction
- Very short prose, often under a thousand words, in which compression is the governing constraint.
- Memoir
- Prose drawn from the writer's own experience, distinguished from fiction by the claim that the events occurred.
- Creative nonfiction
- Writing that uses the techniques of storytelling while holding itself to the factual standards of nonfiction.
- Draft
- A version of a piece that the writer does not yet consider finished, and which is not published here.
- Voice
- The consistent manner of a piece of writing, made up of word choice, rhythm and attitude, which is what a reader recognises before they can name it.
Fiction, memory and the line between them
Some of what will appear here will be invented and some will be remembered, and the site will say which is which. That marking matters more than it might appear. A reader who believes a story happened reads it differently from one who knows it was made, and a writer who blurs the two is borrowing the authority of testimony for a piece that has not earned it.
Memory complicates this honestly rather than dishonestly. Anyone writing about their own past is working from an unreliable record: details shift, chronology compresses, and a scene recalled twenty years later has been reshaped by every retelling in between. The response is not to abandon the attempt but to be candid about it. Where a remembered piece has been shaped for the page, that will be said in the piece.
Where other people appear in work drawn from life, they will be handled with the care owed to someone who did not choose to be written about. Living people who are not public figures will not be identified without their agreement, and details that would identify them will be changed. A story is not worth more than the person in it.
How pieces will be published
Each story will have its own page and its own address, and that address will not change once it is issued. Links that work should keep working. A piece that has been substantially revised after publication will carry a dated note saying so, because a reader who returns to something they remember is entitled to know it has moved beneath them.
Nothing will be published before it is finished. There will be no serialised drafts, no work in progress posted to maintain a schedule, and no publishing calendar at all. The site will be updated when there is something to put on it, which may mean long quiet periods, and long quiet periods are an acceptable cost of not putting up filler.
There will be no advertising, no tracking beyond what is needed to keep the site standing, and no requirement to give an email address to read anything. The stories will be free to read, in full, on the page.
What a piece has to do to appear here
The first test is completion. A great deal of writing is abandoned rather than finished, and abandoned writing has a recognisable quality: it is often strongest at the start, because that is the part written with conviction. If a piece has been left because the ending would not come, it is not ready, and no amount of polishing the opening will change that.
The second test is necessity. Every piece should be one that could not simply have been said. If a story reduces without loss to its own summary, then the summary was the work and the story was decoration around it. That is the most common failure in short prose and it is not always obvious from inside the writing.
The third test is that it should be readable by someone who knows nothing about the author. Writing that depends on the reader already caring about the writer is a diary entry, and a diary entry is a legitimate thing to keep but not a thing to publish. What goes up here has to work for a stranger.
What this writing is set against
Short prose in English draws on a long tradition, and it would be dishonest to pretend a new site arrives without one. The forms that matter most to this collection are the ones that trust the reader: work that supplies a situation and declines to explain it, that ends a beat before the reader expects, and that treats the omission as part of the design rather than as something withheld.
There is also a debt to storytelling that was spoken before it was written. Stories told aloud in a family, in a language other than the one they are eventually written down in, carry rhythms that do not survive translation into a neutral register. Some of what appears here will be an attempt to keep those rhythms rather than to smooth them out, and the result will sometimes read as slightly foreign to a reader who expects standard literary English. That is intended.
None of this is a manifesto. Preferences stated in advance are usually contradicted by the work, and the stories, when they appear, will be the actual argument.
The rest of the writing
This site is deliberately narrow, and the other writing lives elsewhere so that it does not crowd the stories out. Articles, professional commentary and pieces about education and training are published separately and in quantity, and a reader looking for that material will find a great deal of it rather than the empty page they have found here.
Poems are also kept apart, on their own site, for the same reason. A poem and a story make different demands on attention and reading them in sequence does neither any favours. Keeping the forms in separate rooms is a small courtesy to the reader and a useful discipline for the writer.
If you have arrived here looking for something specific and not found it, the other sites are the place to look. This one will be worth returning to later.
The room is built and swept. The stories are still being written, and they will appear here when they are done.