Granta 99: What Happened Next

This issue of Granta is about storytelling – the stories we invent, the stories we tell about other people, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives.

Richard Ford: ‘Stories are created. It isn’t as if they’re “out there” waiting in some Platonic hyper-space like unread emails. They aren’t. Writers make stories up. It might be that when stories turn out to be good they then achieve a quality of inevitability, of there seeming to have been a previously existing and important space that they perfectly fill. But that isn’t what’s true. I’m sure of it. A story makes its own space and then fills it. Writers don’t “find” stories – although some writers might say so. This to me just means they have a vocabulary that’s inadequate at depicting what they actually do. They’re like Hemingway – always fleeing complexity as if it were a barn fire.’