Naomi Wood

13 November 2025

What makes a short story different from a novel? November’s event saw Naomi Wood, prize- winning writer and Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA), combine a masterclass with her conversation with Rose Gant. One of the short stories in her latest collection, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2023. And yes, the title is inspired by the Taylor Swift song (and children ruining nice things!) 

Describing herself as a ‘reformed novelist’, Naomi’s collection stems from the time deprivation that came with two children, having spent a decade writing novels. She wrote nine short stories during spare moments over three years, mastering the art of the shorter form. The collection features charmingly toxic women who fantasise about burning their lives down. But we discovered that motherhood is a deeper driving force. Determined that her portrait of motherhood be neither rose-tinted nor thorny, the collection balances the drudgery, the relentlessness and the temptation of abandoning everything with the fierce intense love shining through. 

Naomi gets her ideas from a feeling or an incident, and she shared an anecdote that inspired the first story. After maternity leave she went to a UEA meeting for new mothers, prepared for HR tedium. Yet everyone ended up talking about feelings and breastfeeding, which she realised she was running away from. ‘Apart from my panic, it was quite funny and I wanted to write about that’. Leslie, who happens to be her favourite character, experiences something similar, culminating in a pen being thrown at a corporate therapist’s head. 

Her masterclass focused on the form of the short story. ‘Most novelists cannot write short stories’, she exclaimed, expanding that novels hold many tensions and are essentially the art of expansion. Crucially too, a reader knows where the end is. A short story holds back a sense of its ending, and should only have a narrow question, answered, or refusing to be answered, at the end. Having the right structure makes the story sing.

After identifying the character’s worldly trouble, ‘beats’ are the causality of progression, actions resulting in consequences, escalating and increasing tension and keeping engagement, but she stressed, never do what the reader wants or expects, making it believable, but not far- fetched. Time jumps, setting change and stereotype rebuttal help with this. Her masterclass crescendo was the revelation of structuring by causality, never by time, or it becomes a chronicle and loses reader satisfaction. 

Endings too can be difficult, like ‘trying to land a jumbo jet on a country lane’. You build up momentum and power, returning to the question, but having to not quite answer it. If the story is not working, the fault is usually at the beginning. The result may be a two-for-one, one story’s beginning, and another’s end! And if it doesn’t work? Some of her best have been born from the worst. Besides, a failed flirtation with a short story is easier to recover from than the deadly marriage of a novel. She stressed the need for hope, ‘the act of writing is an adventure in uncertainty’.

Whilst the evening varied from our usual ‘in conversation’, there was something for everyone. We explored Naomi’s writing journey and the inspiration behind her latest collection, and the writers were left itching to put theory into practice. What’s next? With some irony, a novel. Alas, short story publication is difficult and Naomi’s goal is to be read. She has perfected the art of the beautiful and powerful shorter form, and her passion to encourage more devotees was felt amongst us all.

James Phillips