Post #161 March 18, 2019

“Writing Fiction Today…the Long Game or the Short Game?”

It’s an old question for every storyteller: does my story fit best in a short form or a long form, like a novel?  I’ve written and published both and they both have their own upsides and downsides.  Novels take longer and require a substantial investment of time and effort.  Short stories take less time, but don’t give you the room to explore subplots, or develop characters as you might want.

Let’s see what others think.

Writer’s Digest gives us five areas to consider when making this decision.

1. Duration of the story.  Normally, a short story takes places in a shorter, concentrated period of time.  My sf short story The Better Angels (part of the Colliding Galaxies collection) occurs over just a few days.  A novel may span years in actual story time. 
2. Number of characters.  You’d better keep a short story down to a few characters.  In the story mentioned above, there are five characters.  But my novel Final Victory literally has a cast of hundreds.  In this novel, I also employed a story frame technique…a story inside a larger story.  You can’t do that in short fiction because you don’t have room or time.  In writing novels, like The Farpool, I have found it advisable to develop character backgrounds and bios just so I can keep things straight.  If Joe has blond hair in chapter 1, he’d better not have red hair in chapter 9, without good reason.
3. Plots and Subplots.  In a novel, plots and subplots can quickly become a management issue, requiring the writer to juggle a lot of balls at the same time.  The way I do this is to outline in some detail and keep outlining until I’m sure I’ve covered everything.  I also group scenes into chapters in a table format, then  re-outline again.  For me, I can’t do too much outlining.   You don’t need to do this in shorter works, though I usually do a shorter version of this.  Maybe just a few paragraphs per scene, with some connecting ideas to draw the scenes together.  As Writer’s Digest suggests, having more characters makes more plot and more action easier to develop.  Conversely, having the time or space constraint of a short story forces you to make every word count and choose only those scenes and words that advance the story.  It’s great discipline but it isn’t easy...for me, at least.
4. Themes.  I can’t do a better explanation of this than Writer’s Digest, so take a look:

“…when I got the assignment to write this piece, I’d been rereading Anton Chekhov’s short stories. My copy, a sublime little clothbound volume issued by the Modern Library in 1932, features marginalia written by previous owners. In the blank half-page after “Grief,” a story about a bereaved hackney driver and his callously abusive passengers, someone wrote, “Second-lowest man has one job in life: to keep the lowest man down.”

Now that is an incisive reading of the story. One vest-pocket-sized tale was all the great Chekhov needed to pierce our hearts with that truth. Just like Chekhov, in a short story you should be trying to get at one or two poignant aspects of being human. In a novel, you can create characters, let them loose, follow them and see what they do. If you feel your story will be more a journey than a statement, you may be leaning toward a novel.”

5. Commitment.  A short story might take a few days or a few weeks.  A novel could take a year.  It’s a substantial investment of time and energy.  For me, often the story or the characters will tell me what they want.  Sometimes a story just feels like a novel, with the abundant room to explore themes, subplots, character details, etc.  Other times, it feels like something shorter.  


 I have found that my particular talents tend toward the longer form.  I feel most comfortable telling stories that give me space to move around, knock things down, explore characters and put them in revealing situations.  Even when I try hard to write a story at a shorter length, it feels like a straitjacket.  It just takes my storytelling motor time and space to warm up.
   
Having said that, I will have to admit that developing and writing my serials Quantum Troopers and Time Jumpers were done, in part, to try out the discipline of doing 15-20,000 word stories to a strict schedule.  Could I maintain the pace and tell the stories over the year plus it’s taken to get to the final episode?  Time will tell on that.   


The short game or the long game is an individual writer decision.  There’s no right or wrong here.  You really have to rely on your instincts and how the story idea feels to you as it gets fleshed out.  And don’t be afraid to change your thinking half way through. 


The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 25. See you then.

Phil B.

1.