How long is it?

Well, based on the comments in last week’s Open Mic, it looks like I’m going to be talking about structure and endings for a while. Rowan M got in first, with a request for a post about length—specifically, how you tell how long a story will be before you write it.

The first short answer is, you don’t. The slightly longer answer is, “mainly through experience, though you won’t always be right.” The really long answer is…

How long a story will be depends on three things: what your natural length is, how narrowly focused your story idea is or can be, and the way the writer’s process interacts with everything else.

1. The writer’s natural length.

When I was getting started, I wrote a lot of “short stories,” because at the time I thought you were supposed to learn the craft on short fiction (plus, committing to a novel was intimidating). Eventually, I started getting rejection comments from editors like “This sounds like the plot outline for a novel” and “This sounds like chapter 3 of a novel.” I sold the first novel I ever wrote, but it took me five entire written (and sold) novels before I figured out how to write a saleable short story (and that one was well over 16,000 words, which is a novelette by any standard, and very, very close to some definitions of novella). My natural length is the novel.

A friend who started near the same time as I did wrote—and sold—19 short stories in around three years. She wrote three entire novels before she managed a fourth that was saleable (and no, she never has sold those early ones, for good reason). She’s a natural short story writer.

Having a natural length doesn’t mean that is the only kind of story idea your backbrain feeds you, but it does mean that if you just sit down and write, you will probably unconsciously end up with something that is in your natural range. It also means that if you, like me, try to start with something that isn’t your natural length, you’ll probably end up either padding it (if you’re a natural-short writer trying to write a novel) or condensing it (if you’re a novelist trying to write short stories).

And before anyone asks, of course a writer can learn to write stories that are longer or shorter than their natural length. It just takes a bit more time and effort, and it’s easier to do when one has learned a bit more about the craft. It is, in my opinion, easier to learn craft by writing what comes naturally (in terms of length). Writing is hard enough as it is. Why make it harder?

2. How focused the story idea is.

One of the things that I eventually learned in my journey to being able to write actual short stories (as opposed to excerpted chapters and condensed plot outlines) was that the biggest difference between a novel and a short story is how tightly focused the story is. It’s like the difference between taking a picture of a landscape and taking a picture of a single butterfly sitting on a daisy. They can both be great photos, but they have to be composed differently. The details you pay attention to are different.

Some story ideas are tightly focused on a specific, self-contained thing—a self-contained incident, a decision, a significant moment in a character’s life. Those usually are short-story ideas with a minimal number of scenes and characters. Other story ideas are bigger from the get-go, involving more time, more characters, more places, and more going on in general. Those are usually novels, or even series. But a lot of ideas can be either, depending on how the writer chooses to approach them, which leads to:

3. The writer’s process.

One of the big differences between novelists and short-story writers seems to be how easily one gets distracted by a cool new character/incident/plot-twist/background-detail. In a novel, there’s room for digressions about the historical significance of the Taj Mahal, the interesting family life of a secondary character, or the unexpected rain of diamonds on the third Thursday of Sextember. In a short story, any of those things would probably have to be set aside to be a different, entirely separate short story. Short stories do not only need to be tightly focused; they require the writer to focus (or at least, to not run down fascinating side-trails whenever they think one up).

Also, figuring out where and when a particular story starts and ends can be a particular problem, especially for character-centered writers. If one stops to think about it, very few books begin with “Chapter One: I am Born” and end with “Chapter Sixty: My Funeral,” but some writers have trouble breaking down their character’s life into self-contained episodes (even novel-length ones). For them, their main character’s story is that character’s entire biography, and how long it takes to describe it is a function of how much detail the author goes into. They have to decide whether they’re writing the biographical article for the Encyclopedia Galactica, or whether they’re doing the twenty-volume detailed description of all the character’s adventures from age 1 to age 65.

What all this boils down to is that “how long this story is going to be” depends only partly on the story idea (and how focused it is); the rest is a matter of the choices the author makes, consciously or unconsciously.