How Will Richter wrote the story that won the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize
The Vancouver writer won $6,000, a writing residency and publication on CBC Books
Will Richter won the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize for his story Just a Howl.
Richter is a writer living in Vancouver. He's currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel. He previously made the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Proverbs of the Lesser and was also longlisted in 2019 for his story At a Distance.
The B.C.-based Richter received $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and the opportunity to attend a two-week writing residency.
The 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is now open to Canadian writers! You could win $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have the opportunity to attend a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and have your work published on CBC Books.
The prize is open until Nov. 1, 2023! Submit now for a chance to win!
To inspire you, check out the story behind last year's winning story, Just a Howl by Will Richter, below. Richter spoke to CBC Books about how he wrote his winning entry.
The author that inspired the writer
"This story wouldn't exist if a month prior to writing it, Salman Rushdie hadn't been stabbed.
"But also recently, I happened to have read his autobiography [about] when the fatwa was first declared against him and that whole period of 10-15 years when he was in hiding. He unfortunately came out of hiding — and then this happened.
This story wouldn't exist if a month prior to writing it, Salman Rushdie hadn't been stabbed.- Will Richter
"So that was very much in my mind. It just got me thinking about this kind of weird place that authors inhabit in our culture, where they receive a lot of plaudits and there's a lot of respect, but at the same time, we don't often expect their novels to have a huge cultural impact on a wider scale at the same time.
"So that was all percolating when I was writing this."
The impact of writing a story
"The story is about a lot of things, but it's also about my own doubts. There's so many challenges in the world. This [story] talks specifically about mass violence, extremism. But there's so many things: climate change, environmental degradation. You see these things and you want to do something about it.
"But I like to write; that's what I want to do. I think often about what kind of impact writing can have."
Choosing a structure
"For something that's so short, especially 2,500 words, I chose the structure deliberately in order to tell this story in that amount of space. I thought a good way to do that would have been to just tell it non-linearly. You don't really realize it's an interrogation room exactly at the beginning, but then it becomes that.
For something that's so short, especially 2,500 words, I chose the structure deliberately in order to tell this story in that amount of space.- Will Richter
"It allows you to just go back to the important moments. You can tell the story in pieces and flashbacks. You can construct it in a way that is very economical. It allows for that moment of surprise at the end as well. Where the story turns — and you realize what really happened at the end. Hopefully it's a surprise.
"So the structure was very important."
Will Richter's comments have been edited for length and clarity.