Hermit-Crab Fictions: Fresh Stories from Borrowed Forms

These stories, which make use of ready-made templates such as recipes, board-meeting minutes and shopping lists, are a great way for experimenting with form in short fiction

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Hermit-crab stories are stories made from found verbal structures such as a shopping list or board game rules or FAQs or even a penalty charge notice. In my debut collection of short stories, Hotel du Jack, you’ll find quite a few, including an odd ghost story told as a neighbourhood forum thread (‘Who Is My Neighbour?’), a reflection on #metoo in the form of minutes from a divisional board meeting, and a meditation on grief in the form of a dishwasher glossary (‘Our Special Words for Things’). Another story in the collection, ‘Active and Passive Voice’, which recently received a Pushchart nomination, dissects a flawed relationship through the structure of a grammar lesson.

In writing these pieces, I tend to follow a similar process. Identify a verbal template that’s easily recognisable from daily life, preferably something that’s deeply non-literary (a user manual, a recipe, a set of instructions, a product recall notification). Use it to tell an incongruous story, perhaps of grief or heartbreak or madness, while always respecting the…