Short stories

Icon by Peg Kerr Ihinger

It’s been a long time since I wrote a short story. I think my grand lifetime total of short stories is about twenty, of which perhaps twelve were publishable. This is because I’m a natural novelist, which is also why I don’t tend to talk about writing short stories much.

Yet when I was in high school and just getting interested in writing fiction, the conventional wisdom was that the only way to learn to write fiction was to begin with short stories. I never got a good explanation for why this was so. I came away with the impression that starting with short stuff was the logical thing to do—you got to practice all the things that went into a piece of fiction, without spending years working on a probably-unpublishable novel.

It sounded logical, so that’s what I tried to do. It didn’t work. And one of the reasons it took so long for me to realize why it wasn’t working was because everybody seemed to think that the main difference between writing a short story and writing a novel was word count.

It isn’t, at least not for most writers. At the most basic level, most writers have a story length that comes naturally. For some, it’s two to five thousand words, or short stories. For others, it’s 80,000 to 120,000 words, or novel length. For others it’s 200,000 words, plus or minus 50K, or giant fat bestsellers. I know a couple whose natural length seems to be the novella, and a couple of others whose natural length seems to be the long-running, million-word series.

Whatever one’s natural length is, the process of writing it is frequently different from the process one goes through to write other lengths. Natural short story writers have to learn to write longer; natural novelists have to learn to write effectively at shorter lengths. It’s perfectly doable…as long as one recognizes that one can learn whatever writing process one needs to.

Personally, I long ago became convinced that real difference between writing short fiction and writing novels is exactly like everything else in writing: It depends on the writer. By that I mean that most writers have to approach writing short stories in a way that differs from their approach to writing novels, but exactly how that approach differs varies, because writers have different processes and get different things for free.

For me, the difference between writing a short story and writing a novel is the tightness of the focus. It’s the difference between a close-up photo of a single monarch butterfly perched on a flower, where you can count every leg on the butterfly and every leaf on the flower, and a long shot of three thousand monarch butterflies rising from the trees of their sanctuary in Mexico, half of them turning the trees a rusty orange and the other half standing out in patches against the blue sky.

Short stories focus in on one thing. Novels can sprawl, if they like; short stories are concentrated. Quite often, they happen in a short span of time—hours or days—but this isn’t necessary. Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” focuses on one event—the main character’s loss of a valuable borrowed necklace—and the consequences this has for her over the next twenty years. Naomi Kritzer’s “Little Free Library” focuses on the odd relationship that develops over several months between the library owner and…someone…who’s using it; we don’t get any details of the protagonist’s daily life, job, hobbies, or feelings about much of anything other than the books and notes she’s exchanging (and we don’t need them). Ben Bova’s “Stars, Won’t You Hide Me” covers billions of years, but focuses almost entirely on one character.

Because they are a) short and b) tightly focused, one can sometimes complete the first draft of a short story in one sitting, or a couple of days or weeks. But “short” doesn’t always mean “easy” or “fast”—sometime it takes months to get a short story right. One of the Golden Age SF writers told an anecdote about writing four drafts of a particular story, and only getting the viewpoint right on the last try. (And the story only had three characters. One of the false tries was a fourth character invented to be the viewpoint in hopes it would fix things. It didn’t. The viewpoint that made the story work was the one character the author had been resisting using. Funny how that works…)

The processes for writing a short story are not really very different from the processes for writing novels…but your process for writing your short stories may be exceedingly different from your process for writing your novels. A writer whose novel-writing involves doing a deep dive into several main characters may find that their short stories require them to start with a solid plot skeleton, while the one who got plot for free at novel length may need to focus on their protagonist in order to work out what incident makes their short story.

My point here is, as usual, There Is No One True Way. Don’t be surprised if the process you go through to write short fiction is very different from the one that gets you through a novel. Don’t assume that it will be different—it makes sense to start by trying the process that you’re used to, that you know has worked before. But if it doesn’t work at the other length (whether that length is novels or short stories), don’t decide that your muse has fled. Maybe he just needs a change of scenery.