the long and the short of it

this guy trots in and gleefuly perpetuates a quiet old canard – that you practice by writing short stories and then that somehow qualifies you in good time for writing a novel.

Not. True.

I mean, sure, practice makes perfect and the more you write the better a writer you become. BUT.

There are people whose absolute gift is writing short stories who will become BRILLIANT short story writers and have a storied (so to speak) career in that format… who will never in a million years write a novel, because that is NOT their sphere, and they will break their hearts trying to structure a novel like a short story and fail and think it’s their fault because they’re somehow “bad writers”. They are not. They are simply not NOVELISTS. They’re natural-born short story writers.

There are people who are going to break their own hearts trying to rein in a narrative so that it will fit into the more constrained shape of a short story, even though it is naturally a 90K+ story. There are people whose strength might lie in taking the time to explore something, to describe something, in a way that it is impossible to do within the scaffolding of 5000 or even 10 000 words.

Telling the latter group of people that you “learn how to write a novel by writing a lot of short stories” is going to break a lot of people, because the gifts involved in crafting the perfect short story and the perfect novel are not the same gifts. I mean, you will arguably become a better writer by writing more – but if you are a natural novelist you will learn more from one failed novel than you will from trying to write a hundred crappy short stories which are not your natural length and which are pushing you into quite a different mould. PLEASE don’t go into this thinking that there is some sort of “apprenticeship” involved. There isn’t, other than writing a million bad words before writing your first thousand good ones. In time, you will learn what your natural length is, the one where you shine. It is not a “prize’ to become a novelist and you won’t be “missing out” on anything if you don’t “Graduate” to becoming one after you’ve written some predetermined number of short stories – short stories are not practice novels in any way shape or form. You can write a brilliant novel without ever having written anything shorter in your life – it doesn’t mean you’re somehow deficient in something, or jumping a queue, or anything of the sort. Conversely, if you have a stellar career as a short story writer and never ever go on to writing anything longer than say 8000 words… it doesn’t mean you’re a “failed novelist”. It merely means that you have found your lane and are comfortable in it.

These two formats – because they SEEM like an extension of the same thing – are constantly being conflated in this way, and that’s just because they (on the surface) look “alike”. Please note that nobody is suggesting that you have to have an apprenticeship in writing poetry – which is shorter than short stories – before you can graduate to writing a solid story. Because there, it is clear that there are solid and visible differences. Trust me, differences exist between short stories and novels too – they just might not be as glaringly obvious as the difference between a short story and a vilanelle.

*I AM NOT TELLING YOU WHAT TO WRITE*. I am not telling you short stories are better than or inferior to novels. Write them both – write it all! – just don’t spend your life writing short stories believing that if you write enough of them you will “grow up” to be a novelist.

And I’m blurting this out here because the guy over in BLuesky is just oblivious to my point and is just… well… anyway. It needed to be said.