23rd December 2015. I’m stuck in Madrid airport. Flight cancelled. I’m holding a ukulele case, but when a fellow stranded passenger asks what instrument I play, I look over my shoulder, then whisper that it’s a Uzi.

I eventually escape the airport with no security issues, but that imaginary weapon becomes the reason I write stories today.

Why?

A few months later, I saw a writing competition on Twitter. “Comment with the first line of a story,” they said. “The best one wins a free spot on our next short-fiction course.

There was no way I would have paid the 480 pounds to take an online course, but I had a strong feeling that my cheesy machine-gun line would win the prize. It did, and I was thrust into studying and writing short fiction for 6 weeks.

This was my first time studying an online course. Nowadays we click through the materials at lightspeed and put the videos on 2.5x speed to ‘get to the end’. Back then, I took time to study, read, consider, comment, and submit my work.

I can’t remember which stories we read (maybe O. Henry, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence — that kind of thing). The course broke down the aspects for short stories like characters, descriptions, point of view, tense and time, form etc.

Before the course, I never read short stories. They weren’t well rounded narratives like movies or novels. “What’s the point if it’s not finished.”

During 2016, I realised that short stories are not magazine fillers or training wheels for authors. It’s an art form which may not be en vogue (or commercially viable), but one which can make a reader think or feel just as much as a 500-page book.

Since then, I’ve read over 1,000 short stories, and written over 100. Yes, it’s a bit of a writerly, insular world, short fiction, but they are beautiful puzzles. Typical hero’s journeys or 3-act screenplays feel static and predictable compared to the kaleidoscope shapes and forms of short stories. Most of all, the reader does a lot of the writing themselves, filling in gaps and considering the unwritten ending.

Some of my favourite short-story authors: V.S. Pritchett, Jose Luis Borges, Flannery O’Connor, Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Lydia Davis, Italo Calvino. No particular order.

Rather than recommend one of my stories (even the one inspired by my Madrid airport adventure), I implore you to pick one of the greats. You’ll find stories online from all of these authors. Pick one up, look into the kaleidoscope, and admire the shifting patterns.