Size Isn’t Everything!
Almost every day, I get email from a writer who wants advice on the writing of a novel…but has never sold a short story. Invariably, they:
1) Have conceptual and philosophical flaws in their game plan that would have been fixed had they written short stories until they had published at least ten.
2) Claim that they’re “just not short story writers”, that they “just think in novel length”
Here’s why:
1) The basic structures of fiction are consistent. Whether a 100,000 word novel or a 1000 word story, the same interactions of character and plot obtain.
2) In a year you might write a 100,000 word novel…or 50 two-thousand word short stories. You will learn VASTLY more by writing the short stories.
3) A novel is like running a marathon. Would you run a marathon if you’d never successfully run around the block? I doubt it seriously.
4) There is no such thing as an idea with an intrinsic length. Only the expression of an idea has an intrinsic length. You can write a library about a grain of sand, or a short-short about the history of the universe. It is up to you.
5) The ego gets deeply involved in the process of art. And if you’ve spent a year on a book, you are FAR more involved than if you spent a week on a story. This gives you much more emotional wiggle-room for experimentation.
6) You must practice sending your work out, and accepting rejection. The more often you hear “no” the sooner you will get to “yes.”
7) You learn more by writing a new piece than re-writing an old one. With less ego involvement, it is easier to “let a piece go” out into the world.
Honestly, the “I don’t write short fiction” line is the most consistent excuse I hear. Every amateur says that. If that’s what you’ve been saying, change your position…and stop being an amateur!
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Size Isn't Everything
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11 comments:
Curious. Forty five years or so ago when I thought I wanted to write fiction, I thought I could only write short fiction and that the novel length would forever be beyond me.
Got to disagree, even though that's how I did it -- went from having written a bunch of shorts to novels.
They are similar, and the basic idea of telling a story is there, but they are not the same. What you can get away with in a novel, vis a vis wandering off on a tangent, long as it is interesting, you can't do in a short where every word has to move the story forward.
There are sprinters and there are distance runners, and neither can run with the other without major adjustments in training.
It's like the difference between haiku and screenwriting. Yeah, both use words, but the form dictates much of what you have to do. Lot of short story writers can't write books. Lot of book writers can't write screenplays. Lot of screenplay writers can't write short stories or novels. Poetry and songwriting are similar, but not the same.
If you are looking to master your craft and be able to do various forms, then trying assorted kinds is a good thing, but one doesn't necessarily lead to another. I'm not a very good short story writer, I never felt comfortable in the form. Harlan Ellison is a very good short story writer, and he has written a lot of scripts, but only a couple of novels in his career.
What makes a sprinter is not what makes a distance runner -- look at a serious hundred meter guy and an equally-serious marathoner, and their body types aren't similar at all.
A personal ideal might be to train for the decathlon to become developed overall, but the best decathlete usually can't keep up with the specialized experts in any one event.
Maybe it's because I just don't read it, but where is the market for short fiction? I can trip over novels at Walmart, but magazines that publish fiction seem to be in short supply. Travelogues, how-to articles, "reportage" in all its forms are there, but short story fiction doesn't seem to have a big presence.
Thanks for giving more rational support to the short-story approach to writing that makes intuitive sense to me. I had sort of figured that I'd take that approach if I ever actually managed to start writing. Then reading your blog firmed my resolve to take this approach. It makes complete sense.
But then I read Steve Perry's -(who writes the only other blog I read) - comments. They make complete sense. Could you two please have a duel to the death or something - (silat vs. tai chi? cool!) - and have the survivor report which was the One True Approach to Writing? ;0)
I think the evidence is with Steve Perry-- writers seem to have natural lengths. Frederick Brown was a master of the short-short story-- maybe the only one. His novels are good, but they still have a "something major happens every two or three pages" structure.
Heinlein's natural length may have been the novella-- or at least I've been told that, and his novels do seem to fall into longer chunks than Brown's. He did write a short-short or two, and said it was much more difficult than writing at greater length-- Brown just batted short-shorts out.
As for current markets, there are more original anthologies (and reprint anthologies) than there used to be, but I don't know where to find to submit to them. The novel (probably actually the series) is the dominant form in the market. In the forties and fifties, there were people who made a living from short stories, but I don't think that's true any more.
I'd say the bottom line is to keep writing, rather than working in a particular length.
Comparing the career paths for sf writers and poets: "A science fiction short story writer's path seems much varied. Not many of them follow what would appear to be a logical progression: school magazine, small press magazines (both electronic and dead tree markets), Writer's of the Future, larger magazines, the biggest markets, reprints in the "year's best" collections, awards, individual collections, and then the leveraging of their reputations into speaking, workshopping or teaching gigs. They jump all over the place. A science fiction short story writer is much more likely to appear in Asimov's or Analog with an early effort than a poet is to appear in Ploughshares.
And, as far as I can tell, there's no "traditional" path for a science fiction novelist to take. Every novelist I know who has published a book with a major publisher has a twisted and convoluted story about how their novel came to the light of day.
At any rate, I thought the idea of "regional science fiction" was interesting. Except for a very small handful of writers (like Howard Waldrop, and who else is "like" Howard Waldrop?), there doesn't seem to be much regional science fiction in the sense that poets mean it when they talk about regionalism.
Oh, I almost forgot. Sandy and Wendy were very interested in what I had to say about being "paid" for writing short stories. Evidently in poetry there's no analogous equivalent to being paid."
I think the evidence is with Steve Perry-- writers seem to have natural lengths. Frederick Brown was a master of the short-short story-- maybe the only one. His novels are good, but they still have a "something major happens every two or three pages" structure.
Heinlein's natural length may have been the novella-- or at least I've been told that, and his novels do seem to fall into longer chunks than Brown's. He did write a short-short or two, and said it was much more difficult than writing at greater length-- Brown just batted short-shorts out.
As for current markets, there are more original anthologies (and reprint anthologies) than there used to be, but I don't know where to find to submit to them. The novel (probably actually the series) is the dominant form in the market. In the forties and fifties, there were people who made a living from short stories, but I don't think that's true any more.
I'd say the bottom line is to keep writing, rather than working in a particular length.
Hi, Nancy. I agree with you about "natural lengths" being different with different authors, but I wonder what their recommended approach in getting there would be, whatever their optimal length turned out to be. If I remember right, Heinlein began with short stories and novellas, but I wonder if he'd tell us to write a bunch of short stories to learn the craft. I know a couple of writers have recommended just going ahead and writing a novel because you're going to learn so much from all your mistakes.
But so far all the different approaches to becoming a competent writer seem to share the insurmountable problem that you alluded to... you actually have to write.
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