How Corinna Chong wrote the story that won the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize

Corinna Chongwonthe2021 CBC Short Story PrizeforKids in Kindergarten.She received $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsandawriting residency at theBanff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Her winning story was published on CBC Books.

The2024CBC Short Story Prizeis currently openfor submissions. You have until Nov. 1, 2023 to submit your original, unpublished fiction that is up to 2,500 words.

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Originally from Calgary, Chong lives in Kelowna, B.C. and teachesEnglish and fine arts at Okanagan College. She published her first novel, Belinda's Rings, in 2013 and is in the final stages of revision of her second novel, Bad Land.In 2023 she published the short story collectionThe Whole Animalwhich includes her prize-winning story Kids in Kindergarten.

Chong wrote Kids in Kindergarten as she wanted to write a story that couldnavigate in an empathetic way the nuances of pregnancy loss and the struggle to talk about it.

She spoke to CBC Books about how she wrote her winning entry.

Starting with a single line

"I usually start a story with a single line. When I'm putting down that line I have a sense of the feeling or the mood that I want the story ultimately to evoke.There's layers built into that single line from the beginning, so often I'lljust let it sit for a little while.Sometimes it goes in a completely different direction and sometimes I keep that same kernel from the beginning and just build around it.

"It was summertime of last year, that theline from Kids in Kindergarten came to me and I wrote it down. I started a dialogue in my head and I wrote down the first couple hundred words at that point. I left it as I wasn't sure where it was going to go from there.ThenI was reminded about the deadline of the CBC Short Story Prize.I remembered I had this document which I'd started, so I decided to try and finish it.'

With a short story, everything has to be so economical and the first line has to pull the reader in.

"With a short story, everything has to be so economical and the first line has to pull the reader in. I think it has to be multifaceted, it has to have implications, it can't be one-dimensional or straightforward, otherwise the readers are just not going to commit to it."

• ReadKids in Kindergarten

A moment of truth

"One of the things I'm always trying to do when I write is offer a moment of truth or something that readers can identify with, even if they haven't had that experience. One of my favourite writers, Alice Munro, does this for me all the time. I'm reading her workand,out of the blue, I read a line that makes me feel like I didn't know that was true until I read it. It was like an experience that I had, but never been able to articulate.

"With Kids in Kindergarten, I wanted it to read true and to resonate with people who had had similar experiences. But I also wanted to illuminate the complexity of this experience for people who had never gone through it before."

Exploring a core idea

"I think writing short stories are about exploring a core idea that has to do with some kind of internal conflict. I often gravitate towardconflict for characters that involvesecrecy, repression and struggling with problems in isolation.

I often gravitate toward conflict for characters that involve secrecy, repression and struggling with problems in isolation.

"I use the story to figure out how that conflict could play out in a particular situation. I think I pay more attention to language in stories, because I have to be more selective with the words that I choose. That's maybe changing over time too though. The more I practice writing short stories, the more I apply those skills to novel writing as well."

Being selective about language

"My tendency is to sometimes overwrite, and I always have to fight that. I get a lot of joy out of being more selective about my language. It's something I'm really working on and learning as I develop my craft. 2,500 is a huge challenge for me when it comes to writing a story, usually I tend to write stories that are around 4,000 words. It really did force me to boil everything down to essentials.

"When I submitted Kids in Kindergarten, I thought that if I'd had the luxury of more words, I'd have written more, for sure. But I think it turned out to be a better story in the end, without those extra words."

Corinna Chong's comments have been edited for length and clarity.