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Tracey Slaughter
‘Something Very Red Comes Very Close’: Intensity and Short Fiction The writer Sarah Hall has said that a short story happens when ‘something very red comes very close,’ when moments of sudden disturbance and urgency colour a character’s perceptions and experience. Author Tracey Slaughter discusses the presence of ‘something very red’ in her own stories, looking at how this pressure instinctively shapes the short fiction form, its speed, tension, risk, its closeness to poetry and its use of white space. She talks about the form’s sharper reflection of lives ‘in the red’ of social reality, and why we need to listen to its marginal voices. |
