My
mother, of blessed memory, never took my pretensions as a writer very
seriously. Even after
Alfred Hitchcock's
had been publishing my stories for over a decade, I could never get her
to subscribe to the magazine. Once, I gave her a gift subscription as a
Mother's Day present. She didn't renew it. "So they've accepted some
stories from you," she said. "Who knows if they'll ever accept another?"
She had a point. Who knew? Despite her skepticism, I kept giving her
copies of the stories I'd published, and she always read them and often
made shrewd comments. "Why did you throw that idea away on something so
short?" she said after reading one story. "That was a clever idea, much
better than the ideas for your other stories. You could've used it for a
novel, maybe made some
real money."
Again,
she had a point. And I've never forgotten it--my mother was one of the
smartest people I've ever known, and she had a way of being right about
things. Over twenty years later, I've taken that story out again and am
trying to turn it into a novel. I won't mention the title, since the
attempt may come to nothing. But I figure after so many years, no one
but my husband and our daughters will remember that story, so why not
see if the idea will work as a novel? At any rate, the experience has
gotten me thinking. Is there a way of knowing which ideas will work best
as short stories, which will work best as novels? Obviously, I'm no
expert on that subject, at least not according to my mother. So I
decided to see what some far more successful writers have to say. Maybe
my mother would have respected their opinions. (Then again, maybe not.)
In
Telling Lies for Fun & Profit,
Lawrence Block scoffs at the notion that novels require stronger
seminal ideas than short stories do. The same ideas, he says, can work
for either--in fact, short stories always require strong ideas, and
novels often don't. He gets more "sheer enjoyment" from writing short
stories than from writing novels, but each story "requires a reasonably
strong idea, and the idea's used up in a couple of thousand words. I've
written whole novels out of ideas with no more depth to them than
short-story ideas, and I've written other novels without having had a
strong story idea to begin with. They had plot and characters, to be
sure, but those developed as the book went along." Most people, Block
says, can't come up with enough ideas to make a living by writing short
stories; he cites Ed Hoch as an example of one of those rare people who
could. "So I take the easy way out," Block says, "and write novels." For
most people, he believes, that's the more practical choice. So if you
get a good idea for a story, stretch it out into a novel. I think my
mother might have agreed.
John Gardner might have agreed, too, at least to some extent. In
The Art of Fiction,
he discusses several ways of developing an idea for a novel or story.
One way is to start with an idea for a climax and then work
backwards--how did this event come about? "Depending on the complexity
of the writer's way of seeing the event," he says, "depending, that is,
on how much background he [or she] feels our understanding of the event
requires--the climax becomes the high point of a short story, a novella,
or a novel." At the outset, the writer may not know which length will
work best: "Writers often find that an idea for a short story may change
into an idea for a novella or even a novel."
Gardner
does think, however, that these three forms of fiction differ in
fundamental ways. A short story usually has a single epiphany, a novella
may have several, and a novel may have a completely different
structure: "Whereas the short story moves to an `epiphany,' as Joyce
said--in other words, to a climactic moment of recognition on the part
of the central character, or, at least, the reader . . . the novella
moves through a series of small epiphanies or secondary climaxes to a
much more firm conclusion." Novels, on the other hand, should avoid a
"firm conclusion" and make "some pretense of imitating the world in all
its complexity." Gardner takes a swipe at mysteries and other
traditional narratives when he says "too much neatness" mars a novel:
"When all of a novel's strings are too neatly tied together at the end,
as sometimes happens in Dickens and almost always happens in the popular
mystery thriller, we feel the novel to be unlifelike . . .a novel built
as prettily as a teacup is not of much use." So for Gardner, it doesn't
seem to be that some ideas are inherently more suited to short stories
than to novels. Instead, the crucial difference may lie in the writer's
way of developing and resolving that idea--or, in a novel, of not
resolving it.
Elizabeth Bowen, on the other hand,
thinks short stories free the writer from the need to achieve the sort
of resolution novels demand. In her introduction to the 1950
Faber Book of Modern Short Stories,
she says many early English short stories, such as those by Henry James
and Thomas Hardy, try to treat the same sorts of "complex and
motivated" subjects novels do. That approach, she says, is a mistake: No
matter how expertly crafted they may be, short stories that are
essentially "condensed novel[s]" will not achieve the "heroic
simplicity" that should be their trademark. In such stories, "shortness
is not positive; it is nonextension." Consequently, these stories "have
no emotion that is abrupt and special; they do not give mood or incident
a significance outside the novelist's power to explore. Their very
excellence made them a dead end; they did not invite imitation or
advance in any way a development in the short story proper."
Bowen
considers de Maupassant, Chekov, and Poe among the pioneers who truly
broke free from the novel and explored the new, distinctly different
possibilities the short story form offers. A short story, according to
Bowen, should not begin with a complicated plan for a plot, as a novel
might. Rather, it "must spring from an impression or perception pressing
enough, acute enough, to make the writer write." Short stories must be
carefully written, "but conception should have been involuntary, a vital
fortuity. The sought-about-for subject gives the story a dead kernel."
Bowen's ideas about the plot and structure of a short story are
interesting enough to quote at length:
The
plot, whether or not it be ingenious or remarkable, for however short a
way it is to be pursued, ought to raise some issue, so that it may
continue in the mind. The art of the short story permits a break at what
in the novel would be the crux of the plot: the short story, free from
the longeurs of the novel, is also exempt from the novel's
conclusiveness--too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than
the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth. It can, while remaining
rightly prosaic and circumstantial, give scene, action, event, character
a poetic new actuality.
In fact, she says, the short
story may have less in common with the novel than it does with some
other art forms: It should have "the valid central emotion and inner
spontaneity of the lyric" and should be "as composed, in the plastic
sense, and as visual as a picture."
Flannery
O'Connor might take issue with Bowen's contention that a short story
should spring from "an impression or perception." In both novels and
short stories, O'Connor says in "The Nature and Aims of Fiction,"
"something has to happen. A perception is not a story, and no amount of
sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plan don't
have a gift for telling a story." She says the choice between novel and
short story may depend primarily on the writer's "disposition." I can't
resist the temptation to quote her comparison--or, rather, her friend's
comparison--of the experiences of writing these two kinds of narratives:
"She says that when she stops a novel to work on short stories, she
feels as if she has just left a dark wood to be set upon by wolves."
Since novels are a "more diffused form" of fiction, O'Connor says, they
may suit "those who like to linger along the way" and have "a more
massive energy." On the other hand, "for those of us who want to get the
agony over in a hurry, the novel is a burden and a pain."
In
another essay, "Writing Short Stories," O'Connor defines a short story
as an interplay of character, action, and meaning: "A short story is a
complete dramatic action--and in good stories, the characters are shown
through the action, and the action is controlled through the characters,
and the result of this is a meaning that derives from the whole
presented experience." Of these three elements, character (or
"personality") is primary: "A story always involves, in a dramatic way,
the mystery of personality." Although she says a short story's action
must be "complete," her understanding of "complete" definitely doesn't
seem to involve the sort of "conclusiveness" Bowen sees as a flaw in
many novels. O'Connor describes (without naming) her "The Life You Save
May Be Your Own" as an example of "a complete story," even though the
action breaks off in a way many readers might find abrupt (to put it
mildly). For O'Connor, the story is complete because her exploration of
the central character is complete: "There is nothing more about the
mystery of that man's personality that could be shown through that
particular dramatization." So perhaps writers shouldn't start by
deciding whether an idea is better suited to a short story or a novel.
Perhaps they should start by deciding if a character is likely to
generate a good story. "In most good stories," O'Connor says, "it is the
character's personality that creates the action of the story."
Edith Wharton, by contrast, thinks characters are supremely important in novels but not in short stories. As she says in
The Writing of Fiction, "the test of the novel is that its people should be
alive.
No subject in itself, however fruitful, appears to be able to keep a
novel alive; only the characters in it can." On the other hand, "some of
the greatest short stories owe their vitality entirely to the dramatic
rendering of a situation." The differences between characters in novels
and those in stories are so great, in Wharton's opinion, that the short
story could be considered the "direct descendant" not of the novel but
of "the old epic or ballad--of those earlier forms of fiction in all of
which action was the chief affair, and the characters, if they did not
remain mere puppets, seldom or never became more than types." That seems
harsh--did Wharton see the characters in her own "Roman Fever," for
example, as no more individualized than "puppets" or "types"?
Nevertheless, she insists "situation is the main concern of the short
story, character of the novel."
Wharton
shrugs off some other ways of deciding whether a subject is suited to a
novel or a short story. For example, she says the number of "incidents,
or external happenings" doesn't matter much. Many incidents can be
"crowded" into a short story. But a subject that involves "the gradual
unfolding of the inner life of its characters" isn't right for a short
story, and neither is one that involves "producing in the reader's mind
the sense of a lapse of time." Short stories should avoid such subjects
and shouldn't try to achieve such effects. Instead, they should strive
for "compactness and instanteneity" by relying on "two `unities'--the
old traditional one of time, and that other, more modern and complex,
which requires that any rapidly enacted episode shall be seen through
only one pair of eyes." These limits, however, apply only to stories
that are truly short; a remark Wharton makes at one point suggests she
might have 5,000 words in mind as a typical length. She also mentions an
"intermediate" kind of narrative. The "long short story," she says,
might be suitable for "any subject too spreading for conciseness yet too
slight in texture to be stretched into a novel."
"One
of the fiction writer's essential gifts," Wharton maintains, "is that of
discerning whether the subject which presents itself to him [or her],
asking for incarnation, is suited to the proportions of a short story or
a novel." It's too bad the writers quoted here don't offer us more
consistent advice on such an essential matter. When I started working on
this post, I knew these writers wouldn't agree about everything. I
hoped, though, they might agree about something. Alas, that doesn't seem
to be the case. If there's even a thread of consensus running through
these essays and chapters, I missed it. At least I found the
disagreements interesting; at least they pushed me to think about what I
should focus on as I try to make that decades-old short story work as a
novel. What about you? Do you agree with some of these writers more
than with others? Or do you have other criteria for deciding whether an
idea is better suited to a short story or a novel? I'd love to hear what
you think.
# # #
Gardner discusses the novella as well as the short story and the novel; Wharton
discusses "the long short story. This year, the Anthony ballot adds the
novella (8,000 to 40,000 words) to the usual list of categories. So
I'll just casually mention that my "The Last Blue Glass" (
Hitchcock's,
April 2016--9,470 words) would qualify as either a short story or a
novella. So if your short story dance card is already full, you might
consider "The Last Blue Glass" as a novella. You can read it
here.
