On word counts and short stories

And an invitation to read my story 'Khalil', from this year's Mint Lounge Fiction Special

Some good news. On Saturday, January 4, my short story ‘Khalil’ (behind paywall; but you will know what to do) appeared in Mint Lounge’s annual Fiction Special.

As a reader of the print paper since August 2023, I had the chance to read the anthology in its last edition. There were some excellent stories that time: I especially remember the stories by Perumal Murugan (in Janani Kannan’s translation) and by Tejaswini Apte-Rahm. And so it was a very pleasant surprise to find in my inbox an invitation to submit to the 2025 edition.

Writing fiction on commission, to a specified word limit (2000 words for Mint), is not a usual thing for me, or for any fiction writer. Most fiction gets written without knowing its eventual home, and even when a writer—a famous writer, say—is sure of publication, they seldom work with any length limits on their work in progress. Literary magazines impose a word limit, but usually, writers try to find the suitable magazine for their work rather than limit the work to suit a magazine. Though this may work differently with short-story contests, especially prestigious ones.

I have only one prior experience of writing fiction to a word-limit while knowing that what I write will be published (may such instances in non-fiction, but the two things are wholly different). That was in a similar fiction special done by another newspaper, the Indian Express. The word limit there, if I remember correctly, was lesser: 1500 words.

The 1500/2000-word short story is a good challenge, largely because writers have coached themselves into believing that it’s too short. Why the standard length of the contemporary short story is two to three times that word count—check most stories published in the New Yorker, for example—is because of multiple reasons, but one of them (not saying that this is the primary one) is that the short story performs today a function quite beside itself: it signifies a writer’s suitability for the novel. A 5000-word short story requires a solid middle, a length where—after the initial intrigue and/or flourish, or the settlement (between reader and text) regarding things like voice and/or caesurae—the reader’s interest must be sustained through felicity of incident or deft dilation. Both are traits necessary for novelists. So, for places that are as interested in publishing an excellent writer as they are in publishing an excellent story, a longer word count becomes a necessary ask. The Bombay Literary Magazine, for example, has a minimum word count of 2000 words.

A cynical reading of this situation is that the common length of the contemporary short story is a product of the market dynamics around the whole matter, where the novel finds itself at a higher pedestal. Lowering attention spans might warrant that the short-story form’s average word count get smaller, but the contradiction manifesting itself—at least in the prestigious and traditional houses of the short story—is no contradiction when one sees it in the light of those market dynamics. A short-story publication signals the arrival of a writer, the novel is the arrival. But this reading is, I repeat, cynical (even if not erroneous). Willy-nilly, whether for this reason or that, there is a strong tradition behind the long short story, the longer short story, and the novelette.

A century or so back, when story collections didn’t mind the word Tales in their titles and the short-story form hadn’t formalised itself in its difference from the tale, the <2000 word story seems to have had a great time. Some of Kafka’s best fiction finds itself in that length, as does Hemingway’s, as do the stories of many others. It is safe to say that if one is looking for tradition based on word count, there is enough at every level.

For me, the <2000 word short story works as an invitation to experiment. Sometimes the experiment is enabled through an arbitrary limit exposed on oneself (on top of the word limit, if so be the case). In my only short-story collection, Diwali in Muzaffarnagar, there is a story that is a single 2000-word sentence, and another one that has all paragraphs strictly limited at one (usually short) sentence¹. And then there are times when the experimentation is in the way of fragmentation, or challenging the border of fiction and non-fiction, or ignoring characterisation altogether while allowing oneself to be essayistic.

‘Khalil’ was written with a similar mindset. The theme the Mint Lounge editors had chosen for the anthology was ‘War and Peace’. That I had been reading Tolstoy’s novel of the same name the whole of 2024 gave me only a nub of comfort. I resisted metaphorising war—I didn’t want to write about the battles of everyday life, or give the name war to intergenerational conflict, or even look to class war as a way of satisfying the theme—but writing of war qua war was impossible for obvious reasons. But one is witness, one has witnessed—even if from afar. The breakthrough about the what of the story came when I allowed myself to think of it as a possible receptacle for what the devastations caused by war machineries had done to me, on the levels of feeling and thought, in 2024. This included Gaza, foremost, the videos I had seen and am still seeing (it’s no war, that one); it included a realisation of the importance of animals, especially horses, to warfare till the beginning of the 20th century, a realisation I had come to after reflecting on horses in the era Tolstoy’s novel is set in, and from Geoff Dyer’s comments on the animal’s importance in the First World War in his The Missing of the Somme; it included having considered the expulsion of the horse from war mythology, a thing that can make you (stupidly) sad if you allow it to do so; and it included having noticed mules in videos of Gaza.

The title of my story refers to a fictional mule in Gaza. But to come to the mule—Khalil—and the fiction of Khalil is not easy for the story. This is how it begins:

There are videos of Gaza and so one knows that there is, still, a Gaza.

I must have seen thousands of them by now.

In the early months, one saw mule carts carrying bodies—dead, alive, maimed, sizzled, punctured, blown—and there was, among other feelings, always that scintilla of consideration for the mules: those poor, poor beasts, burdened with raw panic, with devastation, whipped from hopelessness here to hopelessness there.

One doesn't see mule carts in videos of Gaza any more. At least I don't. Are the mules still alive? I wonder. What are they eating? Or have they been eaten?

If you happen to read it whole, do drop a word in the comments.

The excellent illustration by Asage that has accompanied the story.

1. DiM has three stories that are more than 12000 words; the longest being close to 20000, in fact. So long for New Yorker length.