The Art of the Short Story
Mar. 13th, 2016 05:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny[Storytellers Unplugged, January 7, 2009; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
There is a myth, in-genre, that an aspiring professional writer’s career should ascend in stages: first short stories, then novels. There are reasons for this myth: it is, in fact, comparatively easier to get one’s first short story published than one’s first novel, and the process of submission-rejection or submission-acceptance-publication is much faster for short stories, meaning that you can that much more quickly start your publication career and word-of-mouth reputation–and that, in turn, can make it easier to get an agent’s or editor’s attention. Note that I’m not claiming it’s the One True Way: many writers sell their first novel without selling--or writing--any short stories at all. But as professional advice goes, it’s pretty good.
As writing advice, on the other hand, not so much.
Short stories are not small novels, and novels are not big short stories. Beyond a certain amount of basic craft, you can’t learn to write a novel by writing short stories. It’s like trying to learn about rhinoceroses by studying tapirs. At a certain point, the ineluctable differences between the two animals become greater than their similarities.
(I encountered this same difficulty as a doctoral student; the common thinking was that you prepared to write your dissertation by writing seminar papers. But seminar papers are generally 20 to 40 pages long; a dissertation is book-length. You can’t learn how to do one by doing the other.)
I find novels, relatively speaking, simple. (”Simple,” as a friend of mine points out, not being synonymous with “easy.”) Short stories baffle me, and the fact that I occasionally write good ones baffles me even more. I don’t know why it works when it works, and I don’t know why it doesn’t work when it doesn’t. (Not, mind you, why the story does or doesn’t work–that I can generally see--but why the thing I do to write the story does or doesn’t work.) This has recently hit home for me again, and consequently, I’ve been trying to articulate the things I do know about why my short-story-writing works on those occasions when it does.
1. The difference between a short story and a novel is qualitative, not just quantitative. It isn’t just the word count that makes something one or the other. They feel different. (At least in my head--and that’s all any of this is: the view from inside my skull.)
2. Short stories are to novels as poems are to short stories. Poems are densely compressed language; novels are expansive, relaxed, even sprawling language. Short stories, for me, are the point in between.
3. A short story is a planetary system in which the satellites, if any, have a very tight orbit. All the bits have to belong to each other, so closely as to be nearly incestuous. Whereas a novel can have moons and rings and comets and maybe even a sister planet.
4. My writing of short stories tends to be more successful if there is a central action or a central image that the rest of the story exists to present. So, in “Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day,” it’s the juxtaposition of the teddy bear and the Vietnam Memorial; in “Draco campestris,” it’s the strange stilted conversation between the taxonomist and the lady beneath the looming skeletons.
(Horror stories work a little differently for me--I think because horror stories come equipped with that central image already installed. The characteristic gesture of the horror story is the revelation, and that’s the thing that the story works towards and for. So they’re easier for me to write and also more likely to feel like small novels (see, for example, “The Watcher in the Corners” and “Wait for Me.”)
5. Short stories should feel bigger on the inside. The best way I know to describe what a good poem does is that it feels like it takes the top of my skull off. It’s an effect of the compression and the way the compression twists language. It takes a brutally short form to make that happen–drabbles can do it, too, like Neil Gaiman’s “Nicholas Was,” and notice how, the shorter the short story gets, the harder it is to distinguish from a poem--so an ordinary short story (1,000-7,500 words) won’t actually take the top of my skull off, but there should still be a sense that you’ve twisted through an underground passage, crawling on your belly even, and have come out into a cavern of crystal and falling water so beautiful that you can’t quite breathe. I am getting perilously close to the Romantic notion of the Sublime, and that is even kind of what I mean, except that it’s purely a linguistic effect. And please notice that this effect has nothing to do with the content of the story; it’s all about the way the words come together and weave around each other, and flip open into something you didn’t expect.
That’s the art of the short story, and it’s harder than it looks.
There is a myth, in-genre, that an aspiring professional writer’s career should ascend in stages: first short stories, then novels. There are reasons for this myth: it is, in fact, comparatively easier to get one’s first short story published than one’s first novel, and the process of submission-rejection or submission-acceptance-publication is much faster for short stories, meaning that you can that much more quickly start your publication career and word-of-mouth reputation–and that, in turn, can make it easier to get an agent’s or editor’s attention. Note that I’m not claiming it’s the One True Way: many writers sell their first novel without selling--or writing--any short stories at all. But as professional advice goes, it’s pretty good.
As writing advice, on the other hand, not so much.
Short stories are not small novels, and novels are not big short stories. Beyond a certain amount of basic craft, you can’t learn to write a novel by writing short stories. It’s like trying to learn about rhinoceroses by studying tapirs. At a certain point, the ineluctable differences between the two animals become greater than their similarities.
(I encountered this same difficulty as a doctoral student; the common thinking was that you prepared to write your dissertation by writing seminar papers. But seminar papers are generally 20 to 40 pages long; a dissertation is book-length. You can’t learn how to do one by doing the other.)
I find novels, relatively speaking, simple. (”Simple,” as a friend of mine points out, not being synonymous with “easy.”) Short stories baffle me, and the fact that I occasionally write good ones baffles me even more. I don’t know why it works when it works, and I don’t know why it doesn’t work when it doesn’t. (Not, mind you, why the story does or doesn’t work–that I can generally see--but why the thing I do to write the story does or doesn’t work.) This has recently hit home for me again, and consequently, I’ve been trying to articulate the things I do know about why my short-story-writing works on those occasions when it does.
1. The difference between a short story and a novel is qualitative, not just quantitative. It isn’t just the word count that makes something one or the other. They feel different. (At least in my head--and that’s all any of this is: the view from inside my skull.)
2. Short stories are to novels as poems are to short stories. Poems are densely compressed language; novels are expansive, relaxed, even sprawling language. Short stories, for me, are the point in between.
3. A short story is a planetary system in which the satellites, if any, have a very tight orbit. All the bits have to belong to each other, so closely as to be nearly incestuous. Whereas a novel can have moons and rings and comets and maybe even a sister planet.
4. My writing of short stories tends to be more successful if there is a central action or a central image that the rest of the story exists to present. So, in “Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day,” it’s the juxtaposition of the teddy bear and the Vietnam Memorial; in “Draco campestris,” it’s the strange stilted conversation between the taxonomist and the lady beneath the looming skeletons.
(Horror stories work a little differently for me--I think because horror stories come equipped with that central image already installed. The characteristic gesture of the horror story is the revelation, and that’s the thing that the story works towards and for. So they’re easier for me to write and also more likely to feel like small novels (see, for example, “The Watcher in the Corners” and “Wait for Me.”)
5. Short stories should feel bigger on the inside. The best way I know to describe what a good poem does is that it feels like it takes the top of my skull off. It’s an effect of the compression and the way the compression twists language. It takes a brutally short form to make that happen–drabbles can do it, too, like Neil Gaiman’s “Nicholas Was,” and notice how, the shorter the short story gets, the harder it is to distinguish from a poem--so an ordinary short story (1,000-7,500 words) won’t actually take the top of my skull off, but there should still be a sense that you’ve twisted through an underground passage, crawling on your belly even, and have come out into a cavern of crystal and falling water so beautiful that you can’t quite breathe. I am getting perilously close to the Romantic notion of the Sublime, and that is even kind of what I mean, except that it’s purely a linguistic effect. And please notice that this effect has nothing to do with the content of the story; it’s all about the way the words come together and weave around each other, and flip open into something you didn’t expect.
That’s the art of the short story, and it’s harder than it looks.
