The Liberating Joy of the Short Story Form
When your novel is giving you headaches, try something smaller.
In This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, which chronicles Ann Patchett’s journey to becoming a writer, Patchett writes of the short story form,
Love the short story for what it is: a handful of glorious pages that take you someplace you never knew you wanted to go.
As both a novelist and a short story writer, I love the way stories happen: you write a sentence, and then another sentence, and a few weeks and twenty or so pages later, you have arrived at a totally unexpected destination.
How does this differ from writing a novel? With a novel, while I don’t know exactly where I’m going or where and how the novel will end or what tangents it will take, I do usually begin with a general sense of direction. A sense of direction is important, because I know that a novel will require an investment of at least a couple of years. So I begin with a setting, a character, and a problem that needs to be solved or a question that begs to be answered.
With a short story I feel more free, because I know my investment of time will be much less substantial. I often don’t know what the problem is when I begin, or even who the major players are. I start instead with language–a series of words that present themselves in my brain and somehow compel me to follow them with other words. A flash fiction is even more freeing. Although I revise a short story many times before sending it out, a flash fiction often takes its near-final form in the moment of writing. When I read flash fiction submissions in my role as an editor, I appreciate that raw, just-written quality many flash fictions have. This isn’t to say the submission hasn’t been revised, only that it gives off an aura of having been written with energy and speed.
Fiction writers frequently debut with a story collection which is followed by a novel. One reason for this pattern is that short stories tend to be the preferred form in graduate writing programs, so many writers come out of their MFA program with a story collection that has been carefully revised. After the writer gets a few good reviews and catches an agent’s eye with a story collection, the writer either decides it would be fun to write a novel or concedes to the demands of the marketplace, or both. The marketplace does favor novels over story collections, so a writer with an agent will often be asked, “Now where’s your novel?”
I never feel quite whole unless I’m working on a book-length project. In fact, I can’t remember a time in the past twenty-five years when I wasn’t working on a book! But there is sustenance to be had in shorter forms too, and when I am feeling tired of my novel-in-progress, or antsy, or simply inspired in a different direction, I often begin a short story, flash fiction, or essay.
When you are feeling at wit’s end about your book-length project, whether it be a novel, novella, or essay collection, I encourage you to set it aside for an hour or day or a week and begin a shorter work instead. It is possible that the writing of the story will push you back, joyfully, to your novel, and that you will abandon the story in short order for the bigger project. But it is also possible that you will sink blissfully into the freedom of the story, and that you will emerge, days or weeks later, with “a handful of glorious pages.”
Do you want to write and publish short stories? You might enjoy my five-week short story course Master the Short Story: Fundamentals of Fiction Writing. Save $10 when you enroll through this link.