idea & length

[truepenny]

So aireon asked a terrible question about figuring out the right length for a story idea. And seeing as how I have added 600 words to "A Night in Electric Squidland" this morning (::shakes fist at matociquala for insisting on payoff::) and am feeling in the mood to fling myself on a nice shiny sword, I thought I'd take a stab, so to speak, at answering it.


The first thing to remember is that the difference between a novel and a short story is qualitative, not quantitative. You cannot simply expand a short story into a novel, and you cannot simply compress a novel into a short story.¹ To use one of my customary violent metaphors, a short story is a commando raid, and a novel is a siege. You don't settle in for a siege if a commando raid can get the job done, and you don't even try a commando raid if you know that it's going to take a siege.

So how do you figure out which one you need?

I'm not always good at this myself, having a tendency to write what I think are short stories only to be told they're the first chapter of a novel, but I think it's a question of balance and scope.

Novels are big. They can give you a feeling of wide-open vistas, or of the sort of intricacy that made medieval monks go blind, but at the idea stage there should be a feeling that anything goes, that you can make this idea into any damn thing you want, papier-mache King Kong or origami cranes.

Short stories have a formal restriction built into them. A little like sonnets. This makes them neither better nor worse than novels; there are some ideas that need a restricted vehicle, because they need to be able to focus. Using my own work as an example--because I know how the idea turned into the story--"Straw" is about this one very specific moment in the life of its narrator. It's not about what happened to her before, except insofar as those events inform her present state of mind; it's not about what's going to happen to her later. Questions may be raised in the reader's mind--and should be--but the answers to those questions aren't necessary to make the story work. It's like a spotlight; we may wish we could see the rest of the stage, but we don't need to.

And this focus can be turned in different directions. "Draco campestris" (which as short stories go is a pretty good siege :P ), is focused on the world-building, with plot and character present, but only in supporting roles. My Kyle Murchison Booth stories (of which "Wait for Me" is an example) are focused on character in a sort of Henry James/Shirley Jackson way,² with plot and world-building secondary. Or if the focus is balanced, it can simply be that the plot is limited, the old 'single continuous action' idea (if I'm quoting that correctly, or have I got it mixed up with John Gardner's thing about 'the dream must be continuous'?). My point is that a short story only has room for so much stuff in it, like Cinderella's glass slipper. Slicing off a novel's toes does not make the slipper fit; it merely makes it bloody.

Now, with this !Buffy story, on the other hand, the spotlight just isn't enough illumination. I know too much about the characters and about their world, and those things keep jumbling and shoving at the edges of the spotlight, making themselves just visible enough to be distracting. The story idea needs explaining; it needs to be laid out like a banquet, with time for readers to nibble and savor, and to dip their paddy paws in fingerbowls between courses. Too many things in the story point outward, and although no story needs to be entirely hermetic, this one is clearly bursting at the seams of the straitjacket I stuffed it in. The character arc is also incommensurate with a 5k plot, to the point that I think I lopped off, not just the toes, but half the poor novel's foot to wedge it into the slipper.

Now, it still works as a short story (I even rather like it), but it works BECAUSE of its apparent foundation in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That is, it's acceptable as a complete story because readers (other than me, of course, since I know what I meant to do) can fill in what they think the world and the characters are like based on the obvious intertext. Now, as it happens, that intertext is wrong, but flagging it as wrong aggressively enough to be noticed against the current of the reader's natural assumptions would make the short story break down because, again, it's pointing at something much larger than a short story can handle.

Closure is important to both forms, and one of the principal ways to make a short story feel like the failed beginning of a novel is to give the ending insufficient sharpness and weight (yes, my metaphor has now shifted to the blade of a guillotine). Even if you want to leave room for other stories in the continuity (as I've been doing recently with "Blue Lace Agate" and "A Night in Electric Squidland"), you still have to make the arc within the short story self-contained. Conversely, with novels--until the actual end--you need just the opposite: although chapters need an arc, those arcs should not close off at the end of the chapter, but lead you encouragingly forward into the arc of the next chapter.³ So if you have a piece of narrative the length of a short story and your ending is too conditional, or too clearly temporary, or leaves too many things sprawling untidily about, waving their tentacles at another piece of narrative, odds are good it's not a short story you've got there.

This problem can be fixed by pointing the ending differently, setting up signposts and cues to show ENDING rather than INTERMISSION. If there actually isn't any more story, and all your readers are saying they think there is,⁴ you've cued the ending wrongly and need to go back and think about it again. That's a syntactical issue; the question of proper scope is about the idea and what it needs in order to tell itself properly.

Another metaphor, this one not violent. Short stories are bonsai trees; their beauty is partly created by the restriction of their form. Novels are weeping willows⁵; their beauty is in the spread and loft of their branches, the strong-knotted entanglement of their roots reaching down into the earth.

Ask your story how it wants to grow.

---
¹This, by the way, is why I think the short story "Flowers for Algernon" is brilliant and the novel Flowers for Algernon is mediocre. The short story does everything that needs to be done, because the idea is a short story idea. You can make it longer, as Keyes did, but you don't gain anything.

²In terms of intent, not quality.

³Which, in this morning's epiphany, I realize is probably why I have the most trouble with endings (I'm bad at novel endings, worse at short story endings): my natural inclination is for unclosed arcs. I always want to keep leading the reader forward, even when there's no forward left.

⁴And, yes, I describe this situation from experience, why do you ask?

⁵Or pick the tree that works for you.

Comments

[iagor.livejournal.com]

Very curious subject. For the length is measured in terms of change within the character. It may be quick, almost brutal in its sudden occurance, or it may be gradual, complex, affected by many factors or it may lay somewhere in between. I suppose I prefer the novel format because the interaction of character and environment motivates me to write. I want to show change within character's nature, to put them through a test and see if they triumph or fail. In those terms, a novel permits me a wider approach then a short story.

Come to think of it, I can only work sucessfully with the opposite ends of the literary spectrum: it's either flash or novel. :)