GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2023/24
An interview with GBP Short Story Prize author Benjamin Wal
Hi Benjamin! Thank you very much for submitting ‘Maintenance’ to the GBP Short Story Prize and congratulations on its longlisting. It’s a beautiful, quite complex story – and it would be great if you could offer our readers a sentence or two, to introduce it.
It’s a story about a man who finds himself on the verge of a potentially life-changing — in his mind, life-ending — diagnosis, whose thoughts turn to his estranged daughter and the mess he has made of their relationship.
And can you tell us a bit more about its inspiration, and the writing of it.
The germ of this story is in another story I wrote a long time ago. It wasn’t a good story, but it did have one decent paragraph that I thought was worth salvaging. From this paragraph sprung ‘Maintenance’. It took a while though, and it was originally a bit shorter to be eligible for writing opportunities with unrealistically low word count limits.
‘Maintenance’ is a story that has some very fine characterisation, and also relies on some finely crafted detailing. The hospital, for example. Being a regular visitor myself, I was impressed about how real you made it feel (the setting, the pressures on the staff, the workloads and the impatience and the many small kindnesses). How did you manage that?!
Most of us have been or will be regular visitors to a hospital, either for ourselves or to accompany someone else, so I wouldn’t claim any special expertise. The routines and procedures of a hospital, alongside the ever-present fear of pain or bad news, provoke feelings of both comfort and dread. I suppose this combination of comfort and dread was what I was going for.
Both the protagonist and his unexpected companion for the day – a fellow, quite trying out-patient called Peter – are both, in their own ways, very vulnerable middle aged men. Can you tell us a bit more about that – and whether you see masculinity (and its blindspots and frailties) as one of the themes of the story. (Loneliness too, now I’m thinking of it. ‘Maintenance’ is almost painful, on that topic.)
I think there’s comedy in someone being confronted by another person who shares some of their less flattering traits. We tend to reject those who remind us of our own flaws or disappointments (or is it just me?). Peter has genuine health problems but visits the hospital perhaps more than he should just for the company. It’s his social life. Leslie recognises this loneliness and seems to despise it.
I’m not trying to say anything about masculinity in a general sense. These are just two men muddling through, not necessarily representative of their sex.
OK! Onto writing in general. How long have you been writing? Do you have a daily routine?
I’ve been writing for many years, but I started writing short fiction more recently. I aspire to a daily routine but can’t seem to make it work.
Writing and rewriting: What’s your ratio?
They’re inseparable. I do spend an embarrassing amount of time revising, and I do it as I go along, so the first few paragraphs will be polished to a fault because I've gone over them a hundred times, and then the quality gradually declines with each successive paragraph. I might need to rethink this method.
And what are you working on at the moment?
I’m writing a play called The Queen’s Blister. I don’t think anyone will actually want to put it on, so to protect my self-esteem I’ve taken to calling it a closet drama not intended for performance.
Other writers. Tell us about some you especially admire – and also what you’re currently reading.
There are loads. Some of my favourite fiction writers are John Updike, Anne Tyler, Tessa Hadley, VS Naipaul, Alan Hollinghurst, Ross Macdonald.
I’m currently reading and enjoying Penelope Lively’s early stories. They’re quite flinty and daring.
And here’s a spot to namecheck any other favourite things: artists, arts, films, cinemas, TV, music… whatever you like.
The best film I’ve seen recently for the first time is Onibaba.
No one is short of music to listen to, I'm sure, but maybe there's someone reading this whose day would be improved by listening to Allen Toussaint’s ‘The Bright Mississippi’.
On TV I’ve mostly been watching old episodes of 24 Hours in Police Custody. If I’m in the mood for some culture I might put on Fake or Fortune.
“The horror of the blank page” is something that has – by pure chance – popped up in our social media timeline two or three times over the past week. So we want end by asking all of our longlisted authors: Do you feel that horror? And how would you advise other writers to get beyond it?
I like starting stories, so I don’t feel any horror of the blank page. It’s the horror of the written page, and all the things I’ll need to do to fix it, that keeps me up at night.
READ benjamin’S GBP SHORT STORY PRIZE NOMINATED STORY, ‘maintenance’, HERE.
BENJAMIN WAL is a short story writer and playwright living in Northampton, England.