Writing Short Stories

Question

"Great piece on Raymond Carver. It got me wondering - is writing short stories a useful thing to do for an aspiring novel writer?"

- George, Florida

Answer

The great thing about writing short stories is that they are precisely what they say they are - short. Writing a novel is a major commitment, but a short story can be planned and written and edited in very little time.

Spending 2 or 3 weeks of your life on a story that you may later look back on as not a complete success is not a big deal. Spending 2 or 3 years writing an unsuccessful novel is more serious. (Although no novel can be seen as a failure, of course, if you learn from your mistakes.)

Short story writing is a great way of practising the art and craft of fiction. And when the times comes to sell your novel, having a handful of published short stories to your name will do you no harm. You might even find that you love the short form so much that you decide to stick with it, producing story collections instead of novels.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that you must want to write short stories. When I started out I wrote nothing but stories. I even had a few published. But my heart wasn't in it. When I thought of an idea for a piece of fiction, I simply thought in terms of 100,000 word novels, not 5,000 word stories. Concentrating on a single incident was limiting to me, and so I stopped doing it.

(Which is not to say that I believed the novel to be a superior art form - just that my imagination was better suited to the broad sweep of novels, not the narrow focus of short stories.)

Also, I preferred to read novels. Still do. I like that feeling of being able to return to the same characters and events night after night, not for the whole thing to be over with in a single sitting. And, as I'm sure I have said elsewhere on this site, writing what you like to read is always the best policy.

Writing short stories, then, is useful if you truly want to do it. If you don't want to do it, don't do it. It certainly isn't a requirement for literary success.

Harvey

P.S. I am planning a series of articles on how to write short stories later in 2010.