I occasionally hear people say that they don’t like short stories. I love them. I acknowledge that they’re a different art form to a novel, or even a novella. But when life is rushed and there’s little time for reading, there’s nothing like the mini-escape — the micro-holiday — of a shorter form of fiction.
Even novels are only part of a story–they have a beginning and an ending, which real life lacks (even conception and death being but punctuation points in the larger story of a community or a family). In a novel, though, the author has time to draw out the motivations and history of the main participants, maybe to follow several plot lines, to allow characters to develop and change, and to solve complex problems and untwist complicated knots. This gives novels their fascination, and the larger and more complicated the novel, the more some people seem to like it. A series with an overarching plot is a wonderful thing, allowing three, six, ten–even fifteen (in some cases) individual full stops within a larger story that spans the entire series.
Novella–that is, 20,000 to 40,000 words of story–are animals of quite a different description. When writing them, I’ve found it best to limit the cast of characters and reduce the plot lines to one major and maybe one minor. Novellas still allow for a problem to be solved, a character to grow, a relationship to be formed.
Short stories, though, are vignettes–paintings of a moment in time. The past is hinted at; character development is minimal; motivations are brushed on in broad strokes; only the main characters stand out and the rest are reduced to background. The shorter the story, the harder the craft of making a satisfying read. And I do love a challenge.
A well crafted short story may leave you wishing it was longer, but is also satisfying. The end is leaves you free to catch that bus, pick those children up, pack up that lunch and return to your desk, turn off the light and go to sleep. Short stories are fun.
So what do you say? Short, novella, short novel or long novel, series or stand-alone? Or (my answer) “Yes, please,” to all.
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This Christmas, I have a novella and a short story in the Belles’ 2020 Christmas collection Holiday Escapes, published in November and comprising four novellas and two short stories. I’ve also just published eleven short stories in Chasing the Tale. I hope you enjoy them.
All excellent points. I particularly like what you say about growth in series. We’re currently enjoying Star Trek Discovery Season 3, largely because the characters grow and change. We’ve given up on a number of series that simply repeated the same situations over and over, with the characters reacting the same way over and over (and over and over).
A novella can be considered a stripped back novel. But a short story is no such thing. A really short short has more in common with a good joke (and a good joke is, in fact, a really short story) than with a novel. It’s all about the punchline. One prime example is the Roald Dahl story Lamb to the Slaughter. It is a perfect gem of a story, but it doesn’t obey any of the rules of a novella or a novel. Read it here. https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lamb.html
I’ve read far more novels that short stories and all my fav characters had that time to expand and develop. I find I prefer writing the shorter ones to reading them. The idea or problem that is the core of flash just doesn’t leave enough space to satisfy me as a reader very often. (At least in the fanfic arena, reader demand often makes the idea shift to an ongoing story. But a pubbed anthology doesn’t give enough feedback to help learn reader tastes)
The way serial publishing has exploded seems to have revived many of the gig and jobber aspects of writing that was popular in Louisa May Alcott and Dickens’ time. (Penny dreadfuls, pulp stories, and pen name proliferation) It always seemed odd to me that major works of the 1800s were published in chunks instead of a single volume, but it is that same principle as the Saturday movie serial with never ending cliffhangers. Everything old is new again.
But the short bites of too short ‘books’ in a series where the overall plot doesn’t move and there’s never any resolution (in any media- books were the first place I noticed the problem but TV, movies, and outright serials have shown this too) I recently unsubscribed from a story that has had about 40 chapters, but no plot development or character growth. You could have swapped chapter three and chapter 37 without anybody noticing, A good series involves change and growth, even if tiny bits. One example is the married Sheldon’s Nobel prize speech would have never worked in any early episode of Big Bang Theory. The show made a lot of use of continuity. A good series is more than a string of in universe stories, it has a progression. Pros have issue with this too. I think Bujold did it far better than Martin. Closure and satisfying story beats over too big to manage.
But then, I still struggle with pacing in most of my stories…