On reading (and writing) the short story, Premonition, by me

A reminder to myself on how I wrote my own short stories

I have nursed too many children with too many colds throughout January and so, as we enter February, I have found I have not had much energy left to read and make notes like I normally do for Reading Alice & Others. Reading short stories, especially Alice Munro ones, do take a lot of concentration, rightly so, and often I will re-read them more than twice just for the purpose of this Substack alone! My last post on The Moons of Jupiter took 12 heartbreaking hours to write (no joke!) and not knowing if anyone is actually reading this at all (um, hi?) can feel a little disheartening to say the least.

So, I thought I’d make it a little easier on myself and pick a story that I actually already know inside out to share with you this month in the hope that it also might not take me an entire and very long day to compose. And so, for this month, the story that I am going to share with you and look in detail at is a story I wrote, Premonition by, huh, me; Huma Qureshi.

The other reason I have chosen to take you through Premonition is because I made myself a quiet little promise, not the same as a resolution mind, to try and write one short story a month. For no other reason than just to keep my writing flow ticking whilst I start plotting my next novel. To my great surprise, I managed this for January, writing an unusual and slightly weird story, but it was not without some heartache and the familiar inner despair of, ‘Oh, but I can’t do this!’

A lovely person I follow both here and on Instagram,

Tahmina Begum

, told me how her young cousin had been reading my collection of short stories, Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love, in order to try and teach herself how to write short stories too. This obviously warmed by heart but it also reminded me, in my despair of self-doubt, that perhaps reading one of my own stories back would show me how I did it too. I rarely, if ever, read my published work back unless required to for, say, an event, because by the time such and such book comes out, I am so very read to move on, so please know that this was not a vanity project for me. When I read it again this weekend, I very much felt a distance from it, like this was something someone else had written. I think that distance helped me read it quite closely. I hope that what I learnt by reading myself critically will serve some of you, whether you are writing your own short stories too or whether you have simply enjoyed reading this story of mine yourself at some point in the past and this analysis of sorts might shed some behind the scenes light on it.

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So, onto the story itself. I’m sorry that the story does not exist online for free but let me begin with a synopsis. The story is the opening story in my collection Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love, and deliberately so because I remember at the time thinking that this was not only one of my favourite stories but also possibly the strongest and I wanted to open the collection on a bang.

The story is written in first person, about a young woman who happens by chance to see her first teenage crush many years later in a crowded restaurant. Seeing him again, so out of context, brings back all her memories of growing up in a fairly conservative Pakistani social circle in England. She recalls huge dinner parties thrown by uncles and aunties, where the boys and girls would not mix, and she recalls this crush on this young guy and how he turned her world upside down, even though she had never even spoken to him. It was, it seemed, a mutual crush; she caught him looking at her in a way that seemed more than coincidental:

‘When I realised it was you watching me, somewhere inside of me a series of synapses sparked. I looked up then, shy and unsure, and though I caught your eye and though we both looked away again, it was not before you held my gaze a fraction longer than was appropriate.

Later that night you were all I could think of and yet I’d never even spoken to you in my entire life.’

In the present, the narrator now lives in London with her boyfriend, Cameron, (in my head, he was always Irish) and she’s barely given her upbringing a second thought since then, having wanted to set a distance between it and herself. She doesn’t have the best relationship with her parents, and as the story unfolds through flashbacks, we learn why. It turns out that all those years ago, her teenage crush took advantage of her, kissing her against her will - she asked him to stop but he didn’t - and the story got spread around as gossip, wildly distorted, so that her reputation suffered. He had told his friends that she…

‘was the one who had asked him to come upstairs and that we had lain tangled upon your friend’s bed, not that you had me pinned up against the door, and you can see how, clearly, this made things worse.’

After this sorry episode, her parents were shunned in their social circle (the consequences of this could not be underestimated) and they also blamed her, their daughter, for what happened too, not believing her side of the story. This is what actually happened:

‘Your hands held my throat firm not because you wanted to hurt me, I think, but because you wanted me to stay, holding me in place up against the door. I turned my head and I bit my lip but you kept at it, ravenous. ‘Hang on, don’t,’ I whispered but your eyes were still shut and you were still lost some place far away. I said nothing because I realised then that even if I did, you wouldn’t listen anyway and so then I let you do whatever you wanted to.’

After she reminisces about this horrible thing that happened to her once, she reflects on how it has made her feel all these years. She realises that:

‘it has not occurred to me that this story might be a defining feature of my life, an important enough thing to tell the person I love.’

And yet, even though she has minimised what has happened, she is still haunted by the feeling of hands at her throat. She admits she doesn’t know why. The story ends with her running by the river, sprinting faster to chase the whispers away.

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I was thrilled at the response that Premonition in particular got. The Guardian said,

‘Premonition beautifully recalls the intensity of a first crush, developed via “a private symphony of glances”, before a bewildering first kiss leads to disaster. And Qureshi captures how such incidents can, in adulthood, seem insignificant and still life-defining.’

while the i paper called Premonition ‘one of the best’ stories in the collection:

‘A woman remembers a teenage infatuation. She tells how, aged 15, she fell for the son of a family friend, who made her heart spin “round and round, like a paper windmill”. After masterfully conjuring the dizziness of first love, Qureshi jerks the story in a darker direction: when the narrator eventually finds herself alone with her crush, he roughly kisses and gropes her, leaving her feeling “shaken, as though you had taken something from me”.

This story also is the one that most people want to talk to me about at book events; all of that is really meaningful, but at the time that I wrote it, I really didn’t know that Premonition, or any of my stories, would ever get published. And I think that kind of naive unknowingness shows in the writing - the language is simple and kind of subdued and quiet, and it reads true, even if it is entirely fiction. When I wrote this I had no idea that Things We Tell The People We Love would ever be received the way it did, never even knew I would write enough words to fill a book, and there is something about the honesty of this, in reading my words on the page that I wish I could get back to again today. I wrote this as an unassuming writer, only there for the story and nothing else. I didn’t over think it. I would give anything to be that kind of writer again. Reading this story was a reminder to me to perhaps just let myself go, focus on writing for myself before anyone else; not get too hung up about what other people say, what other people decide is or is not believable.

It’s curious to me how many people, reviewers both on social media and in the press, assumed that because these stories were set against my heritage, they must therefore have been real. And similarly, this story angered some readers who claimed I was being stereotypical, showing Asian men in a certain light. But I wasn’t thinking about that at all, I never wrote in order to ‘represent’. This story was not real (none of my stories are real). Though elements of Premonition were inspired by a world that I knew - Asian dinner parties every weekend, to which I was dragged to by my parents and as I grew older found terribly stifling - the actual events that spiralled were entirely made up. I simply wanted to explore what shades of darkness could exist in this seemingly naive world where, I think, our parents’ generation believed that we, as young people, were protected. I wanted to push that a little, go to the edges. I wondered what a ‘me too’ story would like set against a world that I knew. And so I asked, ‘what if?’ What if a young girl got taken advantage of in a social world like this, who would be blamed? How would that go, what would it look like?

I also remember reading a Chekhov story in which a character described the wife of a friend, whom he was in love with, as a premonition and I loved that image and wanted to play with it. I’ve always loved that kind of spooky element of a sixth sense, and this story enabled me to play with that; explore the feeling that you know something is going to happen, without any reasonable justification or proof. By doing this, I guess I hoped to centre feelings and emotion as being almost more important than fact or evidence; I think as a writer I tend to feel this a lot.

I also very deliberately decided that what would happen between them would ‘only’ be a kiss, nothing more, because I didn’t my characters would have gone that far. But at the same time, I wanted to show how ‘only’ a kiss could mean so much more in that world. I hadn’t really seen that in books before, and I wanted to show how to some of us, the boundaries are different.

When I read the story back this week, what I was struck by most of all is how simple it is in both its premise and structure. The story starts in the present and moves to the past, then forwards and backwards and forwards and backwards again. There’s an opening image and a final image and inbetween, two catalysts in two timeframes (in the present, it’s seeing her teenage crush again after all these years; in the past, it’s the kiss), after which everything spirals, in both the past and the present. It’s quite interesting to me to see this structure actually worked, because I had at the time I always written without a plan, just a very simple beginning, middle and end. But I now see that perhaps not overthinking the structure really worked. A very simple framework to explore a simple premise. It allowed me to get inside my narrator’s head and explore her feelings. It’s not a complicated timeline. This was reassuring for me to see; sometimes, especially when I read Alice Munro, I get fired up to want to write a story that spans a whole life time but then only end up tying myself in knots. But reading Premonition reminded me that you can still write about a whole life by focusing on a moment that means something significant.

I remember writing this story and wanting to show how tiny little things can mean so much. How a moment might stay with you all your life, in ways at times indiscernible and goes on to shape you, even subconsciously. After the gossip spread and the narrator’s family was ostracised, she can’t wait to leave for university and when she does she would find herself ‘in somebody else’s bed.’

‘I’d whisper, ‘Hang on, don’t’ or sometimes just, ‘Please stop.’ Afterwards I’d lie still in the dark, my body throbbing from being pushed and held by somebody else’s ungentle hands and I’d wonder how I even came to be there. Once or twice I remembered what you had said, how I gave off the impression that it was okay. That I’d asked for it, in a way.’

Would she have been in that position, if she’d never experienced being taken advantage of when she was younger? Would she have placed such a distance between the world she grew up with and the person she is now, if she hadn’t have had that experience, if her parents had not been so disappointed with her? How does your past shape your present? These are questions I think I’ll always look to answer in all my writing; I think there will never be a clear cut answer.

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If you’ve read this far, then perhaps you’ll be interested in more of my stories; you can buy them here (I am reluctant to link to this site, but this way you get to see the ratings and the press reviews in one place, in case you need to be swayed in anyway).

And if you’re even more interested, then maybe you’d like to know that my next short story writing course, Miniature Worlds, starts on February 19th for eight weeks. Miniature Worlds is an invitation to discover and absorb my short story writing process so you can apply it to your own work. With my guidance, you’ll learn how to write short stories that linger with your readers long after they’ve turned the last page.

With creativity at its core, the course is packed with thoughtful essays, inspiring writing tasks, original reading lists and audio recordings. By the end of Miniature Worlds you’ll feel rejuvenated as a writer and more confident in your creative abilities. You’ll be ready to approach your next short story with a new energy and a fresh perspective.

I’d love it if you wanted to come over and join me. Find out more here.

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Have you read Premonition? Do you have any questions about it? Let me know in the comments below! Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you’ll stick around for next month’s close read. If you’ve any suggestions of a story you’d like to read ‘with’ me, feel free to leave me a message for that also.

With love,

Huma