Anthony Shapland: 'If you’re writing short fiction, every word should be doing something'
BY Maya Fernandes
20th Mar 2025
Anthony Shapland was a student on our Short Story – Intensive course in 2022. We caught up to discuss his debut novel, A Room Above a Shop – out now from Granta.
Read on to discover the inspiration behind Anthony's debut novel, his advice for aspiring short fiction writers and his literary inspirations.
Anthony, you studied on our Short Story – Intensive course in 2022. How did studying with us shape the way you approach your writing now?
Ah, it was the beginning! I passed a milestone birthday, turning 50 in the shadow of Covid, so the event went mostly unmarked. The application to join was a gift to myself.
Until the programme, I’d had no formal training or real experience of writing in this way and it was a long time until I gave myself permission. I’m not from an academic background, my limited experience is of art college in the 90s, which was kind of free-form. You were given a corner and three years later, you graduated. It was about making, and thinking-through-making, which was perfect for me.
So, I brought some anxiety with me about being in a ‘class’ – but the exercises, new ways of thinking and structures still resonate today. It’s hard to place exactly when that was, that period where time moved weirdly around Covid, that strange, distorted era of not knowing any of the rules, or what was coming next.
My aim was not necessarily to reach a published 'thing' on a shelf but to reach a stage where I knew that the work was coming towards a level of thoroughness and structure. A work that I would stand by.
Each week, it was like someone opening a door for me when I didn't even know there was another place I was allowed to be. It also started a conversation with Cynan Jones, which is ongoing.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers, particularly those tackling short fiction?
- Notice things. Live in the world and notice things. All your senses, all the weight and lightness of things. At risk of sounding daft, it is all there, waiting. Don’t think that writing is separate from life, that you have to stop and sit at a desk to write.
- Read. Read everything – or listen to everything. Problem pages, novels, instruction manuals and try and understand what those words are doing. Understand the intent – emotional, persuasive, transactional – how does it work on you?
- Forget word counts, just write. Don’t have targets, don’t think that there is a right way or a wrong way to do it. Write in crayon, write in notes, write on your hand, however it makes sense. Glean is a good word, like the Welsh word Gwlana. Both refer to the process of picking over already-harvested land or snagged wool to gather the left-behind, unprofitable scraps, and it’s a good thought to hold. Gather stuff.
- Forget the fetish of a physical book on the shelf, of things printed. It has to be about the writing, and if you’re writing short fiction, every decision, every word should be doing something. Often in conversation we pause and say, ‘Why was I telling you that?’ and it’s worth asking that of every sentence. If the writing isn’t the best that it can be, what’s the point of making it a book?
Setting plays a significant role in A Room Above a Shop, especially the South Wales valley backdrop. How did the landscape and its social context affect your storytelling?
My process is to ‘land’ in a scene or a situation and then write out from there. A bit like arriving somewhere and looking around in order to understand what may happen in that space – or what could happen. It is easier when it’s a landscape I know well.
The book is set in Wales in the late 80s at a time of industrial decline and economic uncertainty and this shifting landscape is a key part of the novel. The central relationship flourishes in the small space above the shop, but the community in which the two men live is both a place of freedom as well as a claustrophobic container for their lives. The sides of the valley shape the river, the railway and the roads that follow one North-South flow.
I still visit the valley where I grew up, I can sense change happening, sudden acceleration. Once it was abandoned to post-industrial waste and regeneration schemes have come and gone. But now it is shifting – drawn into a new life as a commuter town, becoming less isolated, being built over. The space between villages and towns is being filled in one long commuter ribbon and new hybrid 'Wenglish' names are written on the map. I visit my mother there, and she is getting older and I wonder about my future relationship with home.
Given the emotional weight of the themes in your novel – love, Section 28, the AIDS crisis – how do you balance portraying such heavy topics with hope and humanity in your writing?
I think they’re inseparable really – our timeline of events, the social attitudes, the politics and religion of any era – and lives lived. I wanted to build these things as background, as context, more than making them central. The humanity is in their relationships, with each other of course, but I was keen to write realistic family structures of support and rivalry and teasing. There is so much love in the keen and gentle care that M has for his daughter, his father, his mother.
While writing, without giving anything away, I knew the expectations that have been built around some of the themes that crop up in writing about gay relationships (and how they end) and wanted to swerve some of those.
A keen reader will understand the timeline of the two protagonists through the specificity of events. There are huge things that happened that are embedded in our psyche; the moon landing, decimalisation, the miners' strike, the Aberfan disaster. I was really specific about detail – the AIDS leaflets, the Hypermarche, the Outrage! Kiss-in at Eros – though I took liberties with the eclipse I guess, moving it by nine years!
The novel was written out of order and grew in a mosaic of pieces. I am not an efficient plotter, which I’m fine with. I remember quite clearly realising what was ahead for the two characters by the end, and suddenly feeling a huge responsibility to know them inside-out.
Every scenario evolved and was ‘written out’ before getting distilled. At several points during the last few years it has tripled in length in order to help me understand characters or situations. Then it was edited, stripped to the elements that were placed along this timeline and were pertinent to this story.
They were living at a time when politicians would pronounce on the validity of the lived experience of others, where law was being shaped by religious and moral condemnation. We are back there now in the LGBTQ+ community, this time it’s the T not the G. People pronouncing from the sidelines, the same dehumanisation, the same institutional bullying.
Literally everything is at stake for these men. I needed readers in the present day to feel that this wasn’t an affair, a singular thing to hide, but a whole existence.
Would you say that your background in film, photography and audio has an impact on your writing process?
I’m increasingly convinced that they’re the same thing, it’s just the hard edges we like to draw between disciplines that keeps us in-lane. It’s a shame that 'jack-of-all-trades' is a warning, not an invitation. I think we narrow our lives down too soon. At school, I got by – I wasn’t academic enough to be notable, or bad enough to be noticed. I spent a lot of time in the art room. I was the first to go to college in my family, one of those that started life as a polytechnic (what a word! bring it back...) and was very definitive about process.
I learned to look, and by looking, to make some sense of the world. Mimicry and looking is a huge part of this novel, for a reason –
I sit down with a paper and pencil and draw a circle. I sit down with a paper and pencil and draw an O. Same thing?
But one is a drawing or a plan, the other makes a sound when it joins together with other shapes. Sometimes, I’ll be mid-sentence and think about this – like when you think about walking downstairs and your newly conscious brain adds up the complex body-mechanical process that makes you falter – and suddenly all the squiggles and dots break apart.
I try and picture the whole process as one thing. I take pieces and put them together to try and understand the world better. This is the same with writing, filmmaking, or my job supporting and curating artists. Mind you, I have to survive. When you’re offered work building stuff or shovelling dirt or captioning films or whatever, it’s a good thing to hold onto.
Which authors or artists have had the biggest influence on your writing? Are there any particular figures whose work you draw inspiration from?
There are some authors who are seamless, and at the end of reading I have to step back and try and understand how they got me where I am, emotionally. Jon McGregor is one, Annie Proulx another. You can feel that they know how to steer.
A writer I always go back to is Carson McCullors. Her worlds are inhabited with characters who always feel on the edge of things, hesitating at how to be with others. I first read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in my mid twenties and am still astounded at how contemporary her understanding of people is, so much to learn from her ability to write vulnerability. Just this week I re-read Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, which has the same painful and subtle relationships playing out. I guess this taps into my own world of hidden things, unspoken things.
Works in translation are a staple, and I’m curious about different syntax or structures. I grew up in a country where language would frequently shift, from Cymraeg to English, and the flow and impact of these patterns definitely influence the way I write. I’ve chased all of the works of Stefhan Zweig, Yasushi Inoue, Yusinawa Kawabata as well as the short works of Tove Jansson, which have been so underrated, The Listener is flawless. More recently I’ve enjoyed Olivia Rosenthal and Manuel Astur as well as Han Kang and Yoko Ogawa.
We are very lucky right now to have translators and specific publishers with a zeal for collaborative and creative editions, like Peirene and Pushkin.
Max Porter is so nimble with words, and so adept at the physical detail of encounters, of people, that the emotional heft of some of his writing – thrown into the mess and chaos of living – is always exciting to read. It may come as no surprise that Cynan is up there in this respect. I read and reread. What appears to be simple, pared back, is dense with small moments that open up big discoveries. It’s like dropping a spot of oil on a puddle.
It feels like there is a strand of Welsh writing just at the moment – in English and Cymraeg – that is treading new territory, and it feels good to be part of that. Carys Davies, Megan Barker, Rachel Trezise, Thomas Morris and Angharad Price are all doing something really exciting with language and narrative structure.
And finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
Well, there is something brewing. It’s still the equivalent of a circular scribble that I’m trying to untangle.
So far, a Hazel tree grows from a nut that rolls from a pot that smashes on the floor. It’s set on a single, proscribed piece of land and is in four parts. I have also had to find a new word for the point at which a reed breaks the surface of water, tilym, which is significant!
Get your hands on a copy of A Room Above a Shop.
Photography: Michal Iwanowski
The books linked in this blog can be found on our Bookshop.org shop front. Curtis Brown Creative receive 10% whenever someone buys from our bookshop.org page.