IN APRIL the Airedale Writers’ Circle worked on an exercise based on the phrase ‘Tall trees cast long shadows.’

To tell you about the May meeting, we’ll begin with very small trees instead: bonsai, the Japanese art of growing fully formed miniatures in pots so that, being tightly confined, they only grow to a few inches in height.

Best-selling AWC author Mary Jayne Baker is busy promoting her new novel A Bicycle Made for Two with radio interviews, book-signings and the rest.

The rest, in this case, involved writing a short story for the Sunday People’s colour supplement. It’s called The Great Garden Heist, and it’s a rollicking and heart-warming tale of garden gnomes, stolen begonias and a large pair of borrowed underpants.

A short story is a very different challenge from a full-blown novel. So we asked Mary Jayne how she approached writing it.

What - apart from the length - are the differences? What does the form demand from the writer, or impose on her?

She said: “I felt it was a daunting prospect. At 1500 words, the short story would be shorter than a single chapter. It should be a romantic comedy in the same vein as my novels, but in miniature - essentially a simply story told in a handful of short scenes.”

First, there’s only room for a very small cast. In this tale there are just two characters, plus three walk-ons appearing in a single short each. No room for crowds or subplots, and none of the elbow-room for scenery and setting that gives a novel its character.

She said: “I had to be very ruthless, cutting any words that didn’t advance the core plot. The luxury of being able to keep dialogue just because it made me smile was gone, and I missed it a lot. It felt like there was no space to get to know the characters.”

But however short the story, it’s still a story. And to be at all satisfying for the reader it still needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Mary Jayne said: “What I’ve noticed when plotting novels is that they tend to fall into blocks or strands, the plot developing at specified points as follows (bearing in mind the core plot of my books usually involves a love story): meeting, misunderstanding, conflict, resolution, happy ending.”

A bonsai is a complete, mature tree in miniature: roots, trunk, branches and foliage. In the same way, a short story and a full-length novel share a common structure - it’s just that the one grows outdoors, free in the fresh air, wind and rain, while the other is ruthlessly pruned and contained.

Or, to put it another way, we might think of a novel as a collection of short stories, all growing and twining together.

Small trees cast long shadows, too.

l Mary Jayne Baker is the writing pseudonym for Harden graphic designer and Airedale Writers Circle member Lisa Firth. In 2017, she released her second novel, romantic comedy Meet Me At The Lighthouse, with major publishing house HarperCollins.

Meet Me At The Lighthouse, the follow-up to 2016’s The Honey Trap, is set on the Yorkshire coast. It tells the story of Bobbie, a fun-loving twenty-something, and an old schoolfriend.