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

[babilary.livejournal.com]

I must beg to differ. While a short story does have a structure necessitated by length, the novel may use that same structure. The example that comes to mind is Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons. Each chapter of her novel stands alone, and in fact several were printed first as short stories (one in the New Yorker I believe.) You could read chapter 2 without having read chapter 1 and not only understand the story, but see it as a complete stand-alone arc. In novel form, each chapter builds incrementally on the one before, taking these vignettes and making them into a panorama. This may work more easily where world-building is less of an issue, and there are no fantastical landscapes or invented cultures or politics. However, Charles Finlay excerpted sections of his novel The Prodigal Troll to short story markets, as he plans to do with his sequel. (Pardon, Charlie, if I speak out of turn.) My point being, fantasy genre doesn't preclude the divide between short story and novel.

As for closure/payoff in a short story--yes, I think details should be limited to what the medium can contain, but also, different markets will define closure & payoff in different ways. I've read many a published short & gotten to the end only to be surprised that it was the end. That's it? But what about...? Perhaps that anxiety was the author's point, or perhaps my tiny brain couldn't grasp the larger metaphor. In any case, you know the market you're working toward, & your methods probably work very well to that end. I just wanted to note that absolutes are dangerous.

-C

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I like this.

When I'm trying to explain the difference between flash, short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, and epics--and now I can say I've written them all!--it breaks down kinda like this.

Flash is an instant in time. One image, one central conceit, tight as a poem. They usually need a teethkick to have impact, because there's so little time to build up emotional resonance, so they rely completely on the squid.

Short stories only have room for a single arc, really. There can be more than one apparent arc--my monkey story plays this trick--but for the story to have a feeling of unity, the apparent arcs really have to be aspects of the same art. There's no crying in baseball, and no subplots in short stories. They also rely heavily on their symbolism and their hermetic tautness for their impact, which is why a really good short story can *haunt* you in ways novels just won't, even good novels.

Novelettes have room for a subplot. Maybe two. The thematic unity between the external and internal arcs still needs to be tight, though. You have a little more room to sidetrack, but things should still loop back tightly at the end, or it feels all funny and broken and sloshes around.

Novellas... They've got some room to spiderweb. The reason I never could pack "Lucifugous" down into a novelette, and why it needs more room to grow, still, is because I needed to demonstrate all these things about relationships and the various ways seduction works, and I needed the enough characters to show a range of those things, not just a dichotomy.

In novels, though, you get the room to wander, and have thematic digressions, and talk about different aspects of your theme, and show all the sides of the argument. And in epic novels, the really long ones, you can have a thematic fugue, intertwining thematic elements that discourse on a core topic. The Jenny books, for me, do some of that, where they talk about salvage, and God, and family, and responsibility, and finding and losing religion--and how all those things inter-relate. I couldn't have done that in 300 pages. I could have done *one* of those things, maybe two. But not all of them.

And that's what it's all about.

And is this the clue we needed that I think in terms of structure and you think in terms of narrative, as a baseline? *g*

[iagor.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall a writing book where someone was bemoaning that now the novels have moved away from the structure where each chapter had its own complete story arc, linking into a chain of events, and rather become elongated short stories, where no chapter may stand on its own. Can;t remember the book. Bleeeh.

[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. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And is this the clue we needed that I think in terms of structure and you think in terms of narrative, as a baseline?

Heh. Yes. I mean, what you're saying makes sense to me, and I like it, but it's not my natural thought process.

[janni.livejournal.com]

For some time I puzzled at being told my attempts at picture books were really short stories. Forced me to figure out that it's not even about length--it's about the distance a story goes.

I think now that a picture book and a chapter book and a novel are all trying to bridge the same chasm, to go the same distance. Longer works have more room for digressions and subplots, as matociquala says--but they're still trying to go the same distance. It's almost like the picture book takes the bridge across the ravine, while the novel gets out the grappling hooks and the crampons and climbs all the way down and across and back out again--but they both have the same sorts of starting and ending spaces, and arc in similar ways.

But short stories don't, even when they're longer (as they usually are) than picture books. A short story is on the same scale as a novel, but it isn't going the same distance. You're still starting down into that ravine--taking the same sort of route a novel takes--but all the action is about maybe dealing with getting around that first boulder, rather than getting all the way to the other side.

A short story moves like a novel but goes a different distance and leaves you in a different sort of place. A picture book or early reader moves like something else entirely, but leaves you in the same sort of place.

IOW, length is only one of the things it's about, after all.

[babilary.livejournal.com]

I don't know what is meant by that. Do you mean that novels nowadays tend to have cliffhanger chapter endings that drive the reader to the next chapter rather than coming to a stop or pause? That may have more to do with market than anything else. Don't take my earlier statement to mean that I don't like novels that behave in one manner over another--I fiendishly read all types of books with great variation in their structure. The point was only that a novel need not be confined by a particular method or structure to work.

-C

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And wow. That metaphor does not work for me at all.

Which is totally NOT to say it's wrong. Just that for me--no. I caught myself actually shaking my head as I was reading.

I forgot to put the standard disclaimers up at the front, about how creativity is the most subjective thing in the world and no two people look at it the same way, but this really reinforces it. I believe that your way of thinking about it works for you, and I assume you do me the courtesy of believing that my way works for me, but I could not function in your conceptual framework. I'd just fall into the ravine and break both my legs. *g*

[janni.livejournal.com]

:-)

It's always a case of what works, works.

Me, I'm just glad I've sort of almost finally figured out how to write picture books. :-)

[spimby.livejournal.com]

"This, by the way, is why I think the short story "Flowers for Algernon" is brilliant and the novel Flowers for Algernon is mediocre."

Funny, that's exactly the short/novel I pictured. The movie, closer to novel than movie, isn't that great, either.

[spimby.livejournal.com]

"...closer to novel than story," duh.

[iagor.livejournal.com]

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<<The point was only that a novel need not be confined by a particular method or structure to work.>>

I agree with you completely. A novel from my humble point of view is defined not by structure but by scope, but that's a whole another can of worms.


<<I don't know what is meant by that. >>

I simply stated that I've read an argument very similar to yours in a book once. Since most of my stuff is packed, I can't find the book - it's bright and yellow, I just don't recall what the darn thing is called. But in essence, the writer of the book was making an argument that dominant structure of the novel has shifted in the past few decades from segmented into chapters that could almost stand alone as separate short stories to a blended whole, where no part, although technically defined by the author as a chapter, can stand alone.

Typically, the blended structure can be often found in thrillers or mysteries, where each successive element of the narrative would not make sense without the preceeding material.

The short story structure is more common to classics. Hugo. Cooper. Mayne Reid. You can actually make little excerpts of Les Miserables and they will make complete and total sense as short stories with minimal clipping.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I frequently forget to put in the ObDisclaimer about creativity being subjective because I always think it should be taken as read. I'm not doing anything more than trying to articulate how things work in my head, in the hopes that it (a.) will make sense outside my head, (b.) may spark interesting discussion, and (c.) may possibly help somebody else in thinking through their own process. There are no absolutes, and I wasn't trying to say there were. I just wasn't bothering to hedge my description with conditionals. I probably should have.

I was not, however, talking about market. I try to sell short stories once I've written them, but I do not write short stories in order to sell them. I write short stories in order to write them, which means making them work, which means being aware of how form affects function. I also wasn't talking about genre; a short story should work as a short story regardless of its genre. If it doesn't, it's not a short story, it's a gimmick.

We could argue about whether a series of interconnected short stories is the same thing as a novel (I don't think it is), and whether an excerpt from a novel is the same thing as a short story (again, not in my book), but that's a to-may-to/to-mah-to sort of argument and probably not worth getting in a flap over. Subjective, all of it, and like janni says farther down, what matters is what you can make work for yourself.

[babilary.livejournal.com]

A novel from my humble point of view is defined not by structure but by scope...

Amen to that.

Mm, I was thinking about classics I've read and the ones I recall do have a closure at the chapter ends, but not to the extent of the Tyler example. The blended structure seems to be a current trend, much as close third person narration is a trend. I have no preference, except that it should work for the story that is being told. ;)

-C

[callunav.livejournal.com]

This has become one of the distinguishng features between 'intermediate' or 'young adult' novels and unclassified/adult novels: books for younger readers still tend to be what I call episodic: each chapter is a story in its own right, which tells more about the world and characters than the story before it, and allows for another story to be told picking up from where it leaves off. My best example of this is actually an older series - the Anne of Green Gables books. They're absolutely classic in structure as well as being iconic in content, because each chapter is its own story.

In most of the 'adult' fiction that I read, that is no longer a desired structure. It's not just cliff-hangers - in fact, it's not at all cliff-hangers: a story that ends on a cliff-hanger is a story that ends. It's the sense of a novel-length story-arc which is told in scenes, but where all the movement of the story moves smoothly through the novel in one long - possibly very complicated - sweep.

Fewer and fewer novels that I read have identified chapters, in any case. Section-breaks, however they're demarcated, are more often used for shifts in perspective - either from one character to another or alternations between character-perceptions and authorial voice: Terry Pratchett is a good example of both of these - or passage of time, rather than the conclusion of a partial story-line.

There are indeed exceptions to this. I don't even know how much it's a rule, only that it's a generalization that holds true fairly well in what I read. And the retro-engineered impression that comes from this is that a more episodic story, a novel which is told in discrete chapters, feels more juvenile to me.

Now, I read and love children's literature a lot, so that's not derogatory. But it is a qualitative difference. Just as far as my own responses are concerned - and I suspect I'm not completely idiosyncratic in this - my perception of the sophistication, the general complexity and challenge of a novel is slightly moderated by whether it has a strong current pulling me through to the conclusion, or whether it lets me rest and look around and enjoy the scenery every twenty pages or so. (Of course, if something were to mess with this preconception on my part, I'd enjoy that immensely. But the preconception is there.)

[iagor.livejournal.com]

"This has become one of the distinguishng features between 'intermediate' or 'young adult' novels and unclassified/adult novels: books for younger readers still tend to be what I call episodic: "

Thank you! "Episodic" is precisely the word I was looking for but couldn't find. I blame the cold. You understood and explained my point much better than I did :)

[babilary.livejournal.com]

well, you succeeded in sparking an interesting discussion! my comment on market was only a guess that you are familiar with the markets for the types of stories that you write--not that you write stories for those markets, but that your stories have (perhaps) a consistancy that lend themselves to certain markets. for instance, some markets cater to short stories that bend the rules of narrative structure, or open-ended endings. I too, write stories first, then figure out where to send them, and am sometimes hampered by my ignorance of said market, especially the border region between mainstream and genre. the water around there is murky. (or maybe it's just me) the comment about genre, was more about scope--when you have an extensively detailed world that the narrative exists in, sometimes it is better suited to a novel than a short story. but I think we're saying the same thing here--that a short story should work regardless of its genre.

as for the rest, we can agree to disagree. :) whatever works.

-C

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Ummm... I hate to tell you this, but the weeping willow has very shallow roots, and is famously prone to toppling because of this characteristic. You need something deeper rooted, like oaks, most fruit trees, and most nut trees, to maintain this metaphor.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, drat. *g*

Thank you for the information.

[janni.livejournal.com]

books for younger readers still tend to be what I call episodic: each chapter is a story in its own right, which tells more about the world and characters than the story before it, and allows for another story to be told picking up from where it leaves off.

This has completely not been my experience reading YA and MG regularly the past several years. I don't think it's true there anymore, either.

Some very young chapter books do this, but not all of those, either.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Hm. Interesting. I would have called it at at least half-and-half, but as I'm thinking over the more reent YA and intermediate books I've read in the past couple years, I certainly do find a lot of counter examples. You may well be right.

[babilary.livejournal.com]

Yes, I love the organic approach to chapter demarcation. It's interesting to see the influence of other mediums on writing--I think screenwriting and film have become big influences on literature. 'Episodic' work hasn't left adult fiction, but moved into the world of television, and programs like "Lost", or even "Friends". TV is the market for short stories, it seems--the new pulp fiction. Dickens would've had a field-day!

-C

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

What she said.

[safewrite.livejournal.com]

Not arguing, merely giving an example from recent fiction: Allen Steele's Coyote books are what he calls 'mosaic novels' - very nearly a patchwork of shorts that all add up to an overall novel plot arc.

It has the advantage of Allen being able to excerpt his books and publish shorts from them, or to publish shorts that are very representative of his overall style. My favorite example is The Madwoman of Shuttlefield, which caused me to want to read Coyote Rising.

http://ebooks.palmone.com/product/book/excerpt/18719?book=Coyote_Rising:_A_Novel_of_Interstellar_Revolution

[mmarques.livejournal.com]

My maple has roots that go very far (into my neighbors' yards) and large sprawling branches. I also have a love/hate relatinship with my maple, which is perhaps the same as with the novel I'm writing!

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

but for the story to have a feeling of unity, the apparent arcs really have to be aspects of the same art.

Oh. This is great--I really like this. It makes with the sense.

And is especially interesting because I'm sitting here reading your separations and thinking about my Orpheus story and thinking, "But." Because one of the problems with my Orpheus story is--it's not just an Orpheus story. It's a robot dog story, too, and the robot dog story is the Orpheus story.

But it's also a Persephone half-a-story, and this is my "But." Because I know all the way to my bones that making it other than a short story is Not An Option. Also, that taking out Persephone's half-a-story is Not An Option. And not being able to do either of those is part of what I really like about the story and also part of what makes it so tricky to write and part of what may make it fatally flawed. I don't know what to do about it. I'm at the point of, I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm just going to fix what I can fix around it, like bandaging around a compound fracture, and hope it works, taken as a whole.

I don't know. I just think it's interesting. This short story that is a short story--but not a short story, both at once.

It drives me nuts, I'll tell you that. *g*

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Well, yanno, a Persephone story and an Orpheus story have several apparent points of thematic unity. If you see what I mean.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

A short story is on the same scale as a novel, but it isn't going the same distance. You're still starting down into that ravine--taking the same sort of route a novel takes--but all the action is about maybe dealing with getting around that first boulder, rather than getting all the way to the other side

Can't resist commenting here, as this is something I'm working with. I know what you mean, at least about modern short stories. But istm that some stories in Kipling, Maupassant, and Browning do 'go the distance' of a novel, tho with fewer side trips. They don't go straight across like a railroad bridge, but they don't keep their feet on the ground either. Lots of suspension bridges and swinging on grapevines. :-) (And many classic fairy tales have novel-distance plots.)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

:: appreciated and linked to here (http://houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com/19147.html?nc=2) ::

I'm new to LJ and klutzing around old conversations, resisting the impulse to re-open them.... This one was great.