truepenny | like trying to compare wombats and fruit bats

There's a question I've been getting recently, and I finally realized why it always startles me. The question is (though is not always phrased): Why would someone who is a published novelist continue to write short stories? And it startles me because my answer is: Why not? What I realized today is that the problem, if 'problem' is the right word, is the questioner and myself operating off two rather different paradigms of what short stories are for.

There is a myth--and I use the word not as synonymous with a lie, but in its proper meaning, i.e., a story that helps us understand who we are and how our world works. It may or may not be a true story, but truth isn't always the most important thing about myths. Anyway, there's a myth among writers and editors and publishers of sf/f/h that short stories are how you launch your career. It's a story--a myth--that imagines a writer's career as a sort of evolutionary process, where you start with little stories and work your way up to big, like the tiny proto-mammals the size of shrews that eventually evolved into us, Homo sapiens, and sometimes you gotta wonder if that was a good idea, either.

Now, I don't have enough data to evaluate the truth of this myth career-wise; I don't know if it's true now, or ever has been true, that you build your name by writing short stories, and then break into the novel market like Superman through a brick wall. But I do know that viewing short stories as a stepping stone on the way to novels does a disservice to both. Novels aren't just big short stories, and short stories aren't just baby novels. They're two completely different animals. And, as a corollary, a short story writer is not the larval form of a novelist.

Some people are short story writers all the way down to the bone. Ted Chiang springs to mind. Some people only write novels (

pameladean, is it fair to cite you here?). Some people write both novels and short stories, but are markedly more at home in one genre or another (think of Heyer going one way, and Poe the other). Some people do both with panache and élan: Gene Wolfe, for one. But it's not that Dean is more evolutionarily advanced than Chiang, or that we're all hanging around waiting for Wolfe to 'outgrow' short stories. The two forms are different, they're designed to do different things, and skill with one means nothing about ability to do the other.

I know I keep writing both because I have ideas come in various sizes, and trying to make a short story idea into a novel or vice versa is just asking for tears and recriminations later. Also, the two forms have different challenges and different satisfactions, and if it's the sharp, tart bite of a short story you need, a novel will not give you your fix. Personally, I like both wombats and fruit bats, and I wouldn't want to do without either.

The problem with myths is that they're reductive.