Years ago, when I had just broken into professional rates as a short story writer (I made my way hand over hand, as usually, in a way that was supposedly no longer available to my generation, by selling first at 0.25c a word, then 1c, then three, then six, and finally ten – though most stories these days pay six.) Stan Schmidt, then of Analog, told me that theirs was a horrible avocation. “We develop you guys, we train you, and then you go on to write novels and never write a short story again.”
At the time, I thought this was silly. I’d just finished my second novel, and I was writing a short story a weekend, with two or three misses a year.
The thing I didn’t count on was the crazy schedule that would be required for me to stay published when so many were being given their walking papers. Over the next two years, my novel schedule went to three a year, and then to six a year.
And the short stories stopped. They stopped because there simply wasn’t enough time in the week to clean, while I was writing novels. So I had to clean on weekends (instead of writing short stories.) They stopped because at the time it seemed like too much effort to write stories that might never be published (when I throttled back, I was running seventy five percent sell-through, but this still required more work than might seem like because few stories sold at their first outing – which meant I spent a day a week doing secretarial and mailing of stories that had come back. There’s always a lot of those, when you’re submitting sixty stories at any given time.)
So other than writing for anthologies when requested, I didn’t write short stories. And over the last two years – what with the way the rest of publishing is going, but mostly with Marty Greenberg’s death – there have been a lot less invites to anthologies. So I let it go out of habit, I guess.
This year, for reasons only known to the gods of writing, (and they’re all insane) I’ve found myself invited to write… six short stories so far. Not all of them are insanely lucrative, but all of them I have reasons to do, including the one in which the first editor who bought me/gave me a chance pulled a favor. You do what you have to do.
But this means I’ve been trying to cram short stories on the weekends, and failing miserably. I swear I could write half a novel in the time it takes me to write a short story.
And that’s because a story is not a length.
I face this a lot with young, inexperienced writers, who tell me “I have 80k words, so it’s a novel, right?”
It might be, of course, and sometimes it is. But more often than not, no. More often than not, it’s 80k words of disjointed and pointless episodes that lead nowhere.
A story is a coherent whole. Whether is has a moral or not, something has been faced, something accomplished, something changed decisively. (Unless you’re writing high-literature, in which case I can’t help you.)
What I mean is Mary gets up, Mary goes shopping, Mary pets a kitten, Mary comes home is not a story.
However, Mary goes shopping, Mary finds a kitten being abused by kids, fights off the kids, shops for kitten food, brings the kitten home IS. Something happened, and the story built (even if it’s the world’s most vacuous story.)
A novel, similarly, is not just “Stuff happens” but stuff happens that has some sort of unity, whether the unity is the main character overcoming some challenge that takes several episodes to defeat, (The Door Into Summer) or the main character learning a series of tough lessons that make him a better person/soldier (Starship Troopers). The episodes, the iterations of a novel should add up to a coherent whole.
Now some stories can’t be crammed into a short story, and once you’ve trained yourself to thinking in novel plots, it can become really hard to write shorts.
It’s possible to cram a lot in short stories – past events, future aspirations – short thoughts/dialogue can convey entire chapters’ worth of information. But there is a way to do it.
If you’re Bradbury you convey an awful lot through poetic language and implication, which is why his stories are shorter.
So this weekend I found I had to relearn a lot of semi-forgotten craft points, so I could effectively write two very different stories.
It taught me that sometimes you need to change not just the scope or the idea, but the style, so that the style can make a whole story out of what would otherwise be an “episode.”
And it taught me that it is foolish to let skills decay. I guess I should try to clear time and do short stories while doing novels. Each of them teaches different parts of the craft, and short stories teach a certain brevity that some of us natural born novelists could stand to learn.
Mad Genius Club 
10 responses to “Measuring the Story”
“I have 80k words, so it’s a novel, right?”
It might be, of course, and sometimes it is. But more often than not, no. More often than not, it’s 80k words of disjointed and pointless episodes that lead nowhere.
A story is a coherent whole. Whether is has a moral or not, something has been faced, something accomplished, something changed decisively.
True that. And I’ll add that (IMHO) a story should have a satisfying conclusion not a cliff-hnager and a “to be continued…”. It doesn’t have to be “happy ever after” and it can certainly leave the reader wanting to know “what happens next?”, but it should be a spot where you can feel that something has been done. Even though there may still be a distant peak that remains to be conquered we’ve made up this one and admired the view from the top, as it were.
I think that one bad thing traditional publishers did is encourage authors to end a book on a cliffhanger so that the readers would want the sequel. In fact I recall Charlie Stross explaining to me that when he wrote the “merchant princes” books he was pretty much told write the entire tale we’ll split it up into 300 page chunks for you. And there’s a lot of trilogies where book 2 is definitely of the “things happen” variety because the various plots need to continue into book 3 to be resolved properly.
A story is a journey. Whether a 1500 word short short or a seven volume opus, to be successful it must grab the reader and carry them along for the ride. Every hitch, every hiccup, every disconnect that snatches the reader from the intended path creates an excuse for them to leave and never return. It is of course possible to simply write over the heads of your readership which is why young adult is much harder than most think. But in general if even a small percentage of your feedback indicates a reader lost focus or ultimate horror put your book down and never came back, look to the stumbling blocks you put in their path.
The story needs to be long enough to make sense – to connect the beginning successfully to the end – and no more. Preferably, also, no less.
What I’m writing turned into a trilogy because 1) it breaks conveniently and well into three parts, but mostly because 2) the steps in the denouement require all those words. I can’t skip any of them without it setting the whole thing wrong.
When you have an unconventional premise, it may be longer from the beginning to the satisfying end – let’s hope readers agree with me!
Then I look at my paperback copy of Gone With the Wind – and it is LONGER than the whole story I’m writing.
Thank goodness ebooks can be longer if necessary – and that it is actually possible to have a GWTW paperback that is 1468 pages long in a single book. I’m not really pushing any limits.
I’m not going to say that it’s always true, but there is a thing I’ve noticed. All of the shorts I’ve loved have been concept driven. They’ll focus on one act, one decision, or one what-if question. The characters are sketched in barely enough to feel real; the background likewise. All of the novels I’ve loved are character driven. Even if it’s about exploring a possibility, the effect of something on society, or covering an event; at it’s core, it’s about the people dealing with whatever else the book is about. Even something like Heinlein’s juveniles, that rather sketched in the protagonist, this worked. The protagonist was whatever teenager reading it wanted to build rocketships and slay dragons.
That is in general true. In fact, the only exceptions are the short stories of Giovanni Guareschi which are often character driven, which brings me to the exception I’ve noted in my own writing: when the story fills in the back history of a character. The concept STILL needs to be very strong, but you know that character well and so can put him through the dilemmas that you normally wouldn’t even FIND until you wrote a novel.
I think it’s not so much that short story characters tend to be sketchy, as that short stories are configured to make the reader speculate about how the protagonist feels, rather than in novels, where the writer goes into more detail to try and make the reader understand what the writer thinks the character feels.
Love this. Meanwhile, I practiced at a lot of short stories (never did sell) and now, trying to work at novel length, finding myself writing really terse. (then I see some books so bloated *coughTwilightcough* that makes me think maybe a lot of novels should be trimmed with chainsaws)
What about you, Mrs Hoyt? Can you tell a difference going from SS –> Novel vs Novel –> SS? Which do you think is better for aspiring writers to cut their teeth on?
Given today’s market — with indie — I advise the short novel (around 50 to 60k words.)
I started out as a novelist. Then I trained myself to short stories. It was actually a handicap in my first few published novels. while it taught me to grab people — I wrote tons of beginnings — (grab their attention, Sarah points out, before someone thinks he should go out and feel up people) it also made my writing too sparse. Took me watching the reading of another writer to find out novel/series fans LIKE the non-plot-advancing funny bit, or character-illuminating scene. I’ve done better with fans since I started including those. (Think of it as Shakespeare’s “the bit with the dog.”)
I’m still of the opinion that Short fiction is the finest training ground for coherent novels, and for learning the art of putting a lot of setting and background into very little space (which as these are what fills up the turgid tomes, is a good thing). Sarah’s opening/scene settings include some of the best displays of this I’ve ever read.
Yes, but I had to train myself to put things that aren’t directly plot advancing — like the three guys in the car scene in Draw One In the Dark.