write_away | The Length of a Story

The Length of a Story

Is there a way to tell before you start writing whether an idea is more suited to a short story or a novel? I seem to be completely hopeless at judging this right now and I’d like to get better at it. It feels like it should be obvious but somehow it’s not for me. I look at a few of the novel-length stories I've written, and I don't know what made me think that the idea would sustain a novel, even though it did work. They could have just as easily been short stories or novellas.

I got my start in writing with National Novel Writing Month, so novels sort of became my default. Now I'm trying to write more short stories and I'm shifting my thoughts so that I assume each idea will be a short story unless it feels like it should be a novel. But I'm not sure how to judge that.

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There are a few ways. I always plan for "short" because "novel" is not my natural length and never has been. But whether it's 5K or 15K or anywhere in between is really up in the air until I'm done with it and then trying to cram it into the wordcount of whatever antho I'm attempting to sub it to.

There's the MICE quotient: Is it a Mileau, Idea, Character, or Event story? If you have all four as major elements in there, you have a novel. A short can sustain one, maybe two of those, depending on how short you want it to be. Anything more and you're in novelette or novella territory at least.

There's also the notion that each character adds at least 500 words to the story. The more characters you have, the higher your wordcount will be. That being said, I've crammed five Characters, an Idea, and an Event into a story that's under 4000 words long while sustaining a murder mystery with two bodies and three perpetrators.

At the end of the day, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish with the story. Generally speaking, I just outline it, and whatever length it turns out to be in the writing is the length it is. I don't worry about how long it is until I start subbing it places.

Yeah, I think the big difference is...scope. How complicated you want to make it, and how much detail you want to go into, how subtle you want it to be.

One of the matrices I use, I realize, is how long the major action is going to take in real time. If the character development takes place all at once or over maybe, a day or two, then it would be a short story.

If it's incremental or complex and takes place over months or years, then possibly a novel.

On the other hand, real time doesn't translate to word count, and it matters how much detail you want to go into or how much context is required, how much summation you use....

...so basically it's a math equation with about 17 variables in it, and if I could figure out how to make it equal the end word count, we'd be golden.

This is exactly how I see it. The length of time that passes is a big factor - a story spanning months with action happening throughout is more than likely not going to be short, unless it's perhaps a series of vignettes. For the story itself, the number of conflicts and steps involved in each is a big indicator.

That being said, my default mode is novel and I look at any idea in terms of how much I can expand it and deepen it with no ability to do the reverse.

For me I have to start writing. But it's okay to try it in as many different forms as you want. Ideas are flexible.

I keep thinking about things like Ender's Game (originally a short story before it was expanded into a novel). Anne McCaffrey had a few of those too (I think the first two novels in her Tower and Hive series were originally short stories), and Isaac Asimov had Nightfall and maybe some others. There are also books like The Anvil of the World by Kage Baker, made up of pieces that used to be separate stories but which come together into a well defined book.

It makes me wonder if there really is a length that any particular story is more suited to, or whether it's just up to what you prefer to write.

You brought up a really good point. I never did read the original short story version of Ender's Game, but I think I'm going to do that very soon. I think it'd be a good study to see how the short version was written and how it was expanded into the novel.

I do believe that the difference in the length of the story is more complicated than what one prefers to write though. But that could be just my own difficulty in grasping the how that's speaking. There's this delicate balance between revealing (or involving) certain subplots, backstory, or intricacies of the plot that goes into a long or a short story, where the plot bits have to carry enough depth or weight while at the same time get wrapped out well enough by the end of the story. Then again, I'm speaking from personal struggle here, so it could be moot point as a whole. In general, I find it easier to expand a plot than to shrink one...

Hmm, I've never tried to shrink a plot...I suspect that once you have all those intricacies and things have grown up around the original idea and interwoven into the worldbuilding and filled in all the empty places and then some, it would be heartbreaking to do that.

But...okay, whenever I'm writing something long, I'm always surprised by how many ideas it takes in addition to the original idea. I think I know what I'm doing, where I'm going, and then I get there and I need more ideas.

So if you don't let it grow, if you just stick very simply with the original idea...

I mean, as long as the original idea isn't something like "I want to write an epic story about both sides of a war with 10 viewpoint characters who are all opposed to each other in various ways..."

But that's not really an idea so much as a long term goal requiring about a billion more ideas in order to write this epic. And it's going to end up with all those ideas intertwined...so if you want to intertwine lots of ideas, it's going to be long, but I suppose that's obvious.

But say you start with the traditional character + problem... I don't think the size of the problem dictates the length of the story, because Ender's Game is about aliens that threaten the entire Earth... Hmm. Although that's not really Ender's problem, his problem is getting through the training that's been put in front of him, and what that training is making of him. And the short story, as I recall, has a much tighter focus on that specific problem, whereas the novel has a lot more worldbuilding about the bigger problem of the aliens and the institutions that have been put together (not by Ender, by the various military organizations, etc.) in order to try to solve that problem, and what the effect of those institutions are on Ender and how they cause his problems...

So maybe it's how tightly you want to focus on one specific problem that's the difference between short story and novel?

It would indeed be heartbreaking to take out stuff, but then I also believe in the necessity of knowing way more about a story than what ultimately gets written. The tricky part then becomes picking and choosing which strands to include that would fill the story without having it feel like important bits were not expanded upon and such.

I... think short stories are harder for me in this sense, because it becomes a matter of revealing enough so that there's depth but not so much that it leaves the readers feeling dissatisfied because something felt bare or was not wrapped up well enough. I'd keep fretting whether the short story was too simplistic, which is ironic because it shouldn't be too complicated - otherwise it'd be a long story like you said. :S

It's like the part about finding out that you need more ideas when you're writing. I keep feeling that way when I set out to write a "short" story, even when I probably shouldn't be adding more stuff if I'm trying to keep it short. So I guess at the end of the day, my problem is making the short story interesting enough within its limits.

What you said about the difference lying in how tightly you want to focus on a specific problem makes a lot of sense. It's definitely a major consideration, I would think, when deciding on a length. I'm going to have to keep that in mind for future attempts.

I am so bad at judging length of a story. It's the one thing I need to work on next.

I think the suggestion above about going by how long the action in the story takes place over might be a good rule of thumb. I'll use that the next few times and see how it goes.

totally unrelated but your icon~ Bravely Default has sort of taken over my soul over the last few months.

I played it to death and gave it a rest for a while. Now I'm back on it again.

Yeah, I tend to go in phases? Like, I'll inhale it and then get bummed out by the fandom (I'm in the second half which doesn't help) or annoyed at losing a fight to deRosso again, and then leave it alone for a few days.

Think I'll try deRosso again, actually... Love him, don't love fighting him.

DeRosso is a creep, ugh.

I got burned out when I got a little into the second half and realised I had to do all the battles all over again... pffft. I took a few months off before I picked it up again. Now I'm mostly just grinding because I like it, rather than doing the battles I'm supposed to.

There's a fandom? Where? OMG there are 77 fanfics on AO3 now! When I last looked there were about 3. I might post my own one now.

DeRosso? Sure you don't mean DeRosa? DeRosso is the not-a-vampire who is like the only sensible person in the game. Where as DeRosa is the date-raping creep. Two very different characters with unfortunately similar names. (I clarify because I love not-a-vampire a whole bunch)

I'm enjoying the little differences in the timelines, myself, but I can see how it might be a pain.

Yes! There is a fandom! it is tiny and a lot of it is on tumblr, and a lot of it is ranting about how the second half is dumb. And the rest is Ringabel/Edea instead of any of the lovely femslash pairings possible. I haven't worked on any fic yet, but I have been liveblogging my play through on tumblr. Link yours when you post it?

Edited 2014-07-22 18:11 (UTC)

Yeah I meant DeRosa. I've met DeRosso briefly only, but he was ridiculously cool. Why did they have to give them such similar names?

I just found some of the fandom. Most of it does seem to be Ringabel/Edea, but I also found the kink meme

http://bravelykink.dreamwidth.org/

And this lovely artist:
http://adalheidis.tumblr.com/tagged/bravely-default (warning some porny art)

synecdochic has a helpful bit of meta about that (and a lot of other helpful writing meta), to the effect that one action plot plus one theme or emotional plot equals a short story, two or more action plots plus two or more emotional plots equals a novel, and in between you have novellas.

If I wanted to guarantee I was writing a novel, I'd probably choose to have significant arcs of character development for more than one character, an unsimple action plot, and a plan for changes requiring lots and lots of incremental steps along the way.

If I started writing something by the seat of my pants and wanted to know whether it was going to be a novel or a short story or what, I'd look at how much I was setting up. For instance, if I had written twenty pages and felt that my plot had barely begun, that would be a major clue that it was a novel. And if I found that I had finished setting things up and my plot was already moving forward on the third page, that would be a sign that it would shape up to be fairly short.

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The Length of a Story

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no hard and fast rules, of course

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