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

[chordatesrock]

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.