(Bonus-ish post!) Novels VS Short Stories

Hello there!

This week's (second! Bonus-ish?) post will be about short stories and their advantage over novels/why they're good writing practice.

Here we go!

I recently planned an epic fantasy story/novel. It was good enough in the planning: cool characters, an intricate plot, a cool setting somewhere between fantasy and sci-fi... etc. But when it came to writing it I got to 40k words... and then realized it didn't work. 9/10 of the characters were zzzZzZz and the plot was tedious in itself. I deleted a lot of words (~34k)... and turned it into a short story instead. It works much better now though it still isn't done yet. The point is: the idea I was trying to convey didn't need three main characters and 5 supporting characters each. It didn't need three main plot threads (which were extremely annoying and tedious to come up with and way too intricate to ever make sense) and a million locations all over the map.

This leads me to my next point:

Do you know the main reason why short stories are so beautiful? (which is also why most people - especially authors - don't take them as seriously?)

* they're short.
This means you can focus on one (or max two) ideas to develop and you don't have to derp around endlessly trying to decide what the best scene for every of your plot thread (say: redemption or revenge or... any of these pesky 'themes' you hear so much about) would be. You can focus on one issue...

*and in many ways this is harder.
Writing good short stories is really hard. I'll give you my own as an example. I write about a short story a week... but not all of them are good and I don't have the patience to edit most of them. This means they're kind of... forgotten easily. The real good ones are usually shorts from one or other 'big project' I'm working on.

So why are short stories so hard?

a) they're short (yes. I've said this already. Let's go back to that first * for a bit.)

*You don't have as much space to develop an idea.
*You don't have any second chances to re-introduce characters and their motivations if they don't entirely work in the first scene scene. The introduction must be done neatly and can't contradict itself as much as a novel protagonist's personality and goals might.
*You have to be precise - very precise... and did I mention coherent? Everything you say and everything cool detail of worldbuilding or character-building or... otherwise needs to be relevant to the story.

b) they're not taken as seriously as longer works -such as novels (but this is only relevant if you care about making money/publishing them)

Why are they not taken as seriously as novels? I think - and this is purely my opinion without much research behind it - this is because they are HARD. They are hard to write and they're (often) difficult to understand (though if the author has ANY idea at all what they're doing they should be clearer than a novel.). They're hard to write because they're so condensed. There's no space to make a mistake as in a 90k novel. They're a lot like film scripts in that way.

Then why are short stories so great?

*they force you to focus
*they're great practice (whether it's about character development, setting, motivation, or goals in general). They're the singlemost great medium in which you can really learn how to write a great book and to make your writing excellent. They force you to sharpen your prose and your style and (most importantly) your thoughts. You can't waste a single word when you're writing a short story. And you'll learn what every scene's purpose is in detail.
*they're easy and quick to read whenever (whether you're traveling to work or getting bored of playing video games...)
*they contain a single important thought that can be absorbed in a very short time and (if the story is well-written) will subconsciously tell you something about humanity (pesky theme cropping up yet again!) or some other issue (also theme) that you didn't know before.
*they're perfect if you don't have a lot of time to read (which makes them highly accessible to many many people... if only they gave it a chance)

Does this make sense? I hope you know more about why short stories are so great now!

However... there is a caveat. I have to give you a little warning about short stories: while they're great to learn the craft (you can learn ANY aspect through writing short stories... except perhaps how to write long projects) they're not as desirable as novels. This has many reasons (which are listed on many other websites) and I'm not going to go into it. Bottom line? Novels are easier to sell than short stories if you're in it for the money/the publishability of your projects.

I hope this helped and you learned something from this post! Have a relaxing second half of the week!
J.M.