Short Stories Vs. Novels
Sunday, February 28th, 2010 | Posted by: Christopher Meeks
Short fiction is on my mind as I’m working on a novel. Because the first things I published were short stories, and because I’m now writing novels, I’m seeing how very different novels are from short stories.
It’s a huge challenge for a short story writer to move into being a novelist. My first novel, “The Brightest Moon of the Century,” started as a short story collection, but shortly after starting it, I realized how to turn it into a novel with a through-line. I started seeing it as a whole rather than a bunch of separate stories. Thanks to passion, obsession, and luck, it worked.
With Lorrie Moore’s new novel, “A Gate at the Stairs,” I see a lot of the reviews on Amazon are feeling that Moore isn’t as tight in her novel as she is in her short fiction. The featured review by Robert Holland says the plot is tenuous and, “There were long (they seemed long anyway) stretches in the novel where I wanted to say ‘OK, I get the point! These people are callow and self-absorbed.’”
I’ve just started Moore’s novel, so I can’t comment on it yet. However, Moore is one of my absolute favorite authors. Some of her sentences, with their sardonic observations, have me laugh out loud, highlighting away. Another Amazon reader in defending Moore’s novel says, “This narrator, eccentric 20-year-old Tassie, is not a person who shares her emotions. She deals with things by trying to maintain an emotional distance with humor.”
My point in bringing up Moore’s novel is that it’s a huge challenge to write a novel, and it’s an extra challenge for people who mostly write short stories. Thus, one of my own obsessions with my novel-in-progress is that the story line be tight. I don’t see novels as a long short story but, rather, a more complex story that is compact, even if it’s hundreds of pages long.
My friend Dana Crowell wrote me recently on this subject without my mentioning it. She said, “I have been so disappointed by ‘established writers’ who receive excellent reviews yet their novels lack story.” She goes on to criticize Moore’s novel as well as Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Lacuna. Crowell said, “A novel is story with narrative drive, tension, and structure where arc is crucial to success. One cannot just go on a comic rant for pages on end. Kingsolver has reached a point where I fear she has nothing to say. Thus, she falls back on history and non-fiction to carry her books which now read like didactic history lessons without art or purpose. Her book is a potpourri of styles, a failed epistolary novel, that lacks voice, characterization, structure, and more.”
I happen to be writing a mystery. I’m doing so because a) I ran out of personal experiences to exploit and b) I’m fascinated that the form requires a tight structure. I figure what I learn in writing a mystery will help me in all my future novels, no matter the genre. I love the challenge, too.
Some of America’s greatest writers, such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and more modern writers such as Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, T.C Boyle, and others can write tight short fiction as well as stunning novels. I want to do both, too. I’m not giving up short fiction.
Hey Christopher,
What do you think the demise of the magazine is having?
In the day of Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post, your A list writers were attracted to the short form by big pay outs.
Philip,
That takes us back many years, to the fifties and earlier, when people like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and J.D. Salinger were making good money writing fiction. As Vonnegut once explained, he was supporting his family on his short stories in magazines in the fifties. Then he had to look for other work and sold cars for a while.
These days, MFA writing programs are creating a tsunami of short story writers, and the writers have mainly the literary journals to go to. Literary journals typically can only pay in two copies of the journal in which your story appears. Even so, the competition to get in is fierce. A place like the North Dakota Quarterly, which when I last looked had a circulation of 1200, gets over 500 submissions a month for a handful of selections. Thus, to be published by a journal is an honor.
The main thing, though, is that the audience for fiction is different than in the fifties and earlier, before television. The stories then were often more entertaining than literary. TV and film has usurped that market, so today’s short story writer has to be delivering something unique.
There are still a few magazines like the New Yorker that pay well for short fiction. Lorrie Moore, T.C. Boyle, Margaret Atwood and other well-known names are published by these magazines. Today’s fiction writer, though, as my first agent pointed out, needs to be writing novels if there’s some hope for money.