Learning to write or the short story as apprenticeship: Graham Swift and "Learning to swim"

• Autores: Anastasia Logotheti
• Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / coord. por Gema Soledad Castillo García, María Rosa Cabellos Castilla, Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, Vincent Carlisle Espínola, 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 544-555
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Graham Swift, a major contemporary British novelist, began his career in the 1970s with the publication of short stories. As the author himself has acknowledged in an autobiographical essay entitled “1974” related to the year he began his “apprenticeship as a writer,” the writing of short pieces does not seem to have been an option for him but a necessity. Eleven of Swift’s stories were collected in a slim volume entitled Learning to Swim and Other Stories and published in Britain in 1982. In the 1980s Swift did not continue to build a body of short fiction, dedicating himself solely to the writing of novels. Novelists-in-themaking— like Swift was at the beginning of his career—write stories as a means of learning, as training, as a prelude to writing novels. As a detailed analysis of themes and techniques in Swift’s stories demonstrates, for some authors the writing of short fiction constitutes a laboratory for the nascent novelist.