Short story long

[mrissa]

I'm having a difficulty with thresholds lately. Specifically, my threshold for what should be its own short story, as opposed to a throwaway element in a novel, is probably set way too high right now. I have started looking at perfectly good short story plots and thinking, "Couldn't I condense that to 200 words here and 400 words there in a novel?" And often I could. But I'm not sure that I should, and I'm not sure that if I did, it wouldn't just get cut as irrelevant anyway.

I like having short stories out in circulation. I like publishing short stories. I even like writing short stories, sometimes. But I do not think of myself as a short story writer. I think of myself as a novelist. (If you think that this could cause some mental disconnects for someone who's published zero novels and over forty short stories, you win the prize. But that's a separate thing right now.)

I've heard that when you write novels, you shouldn't hold back cool stuff in fear of not having more later, you should just throw cool stuff at the novel in great heaps and handfuls, and your first-readers can tell you which things you could have integrated better and which you could have left out entirely. And in a lot of ways that seems like good advice. But then, well, novels have natural lengths the way anything else does, and flinging random cool elements at them is not a good way to have an interesting novel, it's a good way to have a meandering mess. I used to be able to deal with this by writing short stories about cool things that didn't fit well into available novels. But I've spent the last year feeling weird about short stories, and as a result, things are starting to pile up and poke in where they're not wanted.

I don't really know how to get this problem to go away. In specific examples, I would be okay either writing a short story or not writing a short story, but hemming and hawing about short stories vs. novel elements is driving me up a tree.

Comments

[gaaneden.livejournal.com]

I like having short stories in circulation while I work on a novel. It makes me feel accomplished and I love having them published.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This worked for me for quite some time. It's not working that way nearly as much now. I still like having them published, but it's less of a fix than it was before.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

On a somewhat (at least tangentially) related note, the NY Times published an essay last week asking Where Is the Great American Hockey Novel? (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/books/review/19gessen.html) and I thought of you.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Fabulous. I haven't worked on The True Tale of Carter Hall in awhile. Maybe soon.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

>>I've heard that when you write novels, you shouldn't hold back cool stuff in fear of not having more later, you should just throw cool stuff at the novel in great heaps and handfuls...<<

It's been my experience overall that when the Muse realizes you are perfectly willing to not hold back the cool stuff but instead put it to good use, then you will have more cool stuff pop into mind later when you need it (or at least shortly after, or in the second draft).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is the problem, yes: extra cool stuff hanging around in great gobs.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is so not true. If I focus on the characters, they get cool stuff, but it may not be the cool stuff I'd thought of, and then I have more cool stuff hanging around begging, which begets more characters, which means more stuff to write, and there's only so much of that before it becomes an overwhelming stack of stuff to write hovering over my head, complete with cool stuff spawning yammering characters and yammering characters spawning cool stuff.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is still not at all helpful with the proliferation of goddamn characters. And that, I'm afraid, is a problem that can't be solved by focusing on characters. Because characters don't go away just because you focus on other characters. They hang around. They're patient.

But anyway I just went and wrote half the short story because the characters in the potential short story wouldn't have gone somewhere else, just in that story. Whether this was a decent choice or not, I can't say, but it's the one I've got on hand right now.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I would be okay either writing a short story or not writing a short story, but hemming and hawing about short stories vs. novel elements is driving me up a tree.

Ehh, write a short story. What harm?

(hey, it's better than hemming and hawing, right? If it's not, then ignore the non-writer behind the curtain and go do something else. Maybe have some pepper slices.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If I'm going to just do something and stop hemming and hawing, working on a novel is just as productive that way as working on a short story.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Well, sure, but if you don't pick one or the other, then you're back to the hemming and hawing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"How...thoughtful. I didn't know I was broken."
"Not broken. Just buggy."

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

So work on a novel, then.

[storytellersjem.livejournal.com]

If this is a first draft, the more you let loose, the better typically. As you improve, you can still do it and will know instinctively when to not overload.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Uh, yah. If I didn't know instinctively not to overload this stuff, it would have already gone in novels and gotten edited back out again, and I wouldn't be hemming and hawing over short stories in the first place.