The Length of a Story

[sarillia]

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.

Comments

[lookingforoctober]

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.

[graychalk]

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...

[lookingforoctober]

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?

[graychalk]

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.