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Author Topic: Short Story Vs. Novel
IINCEPTIONII
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I found this to be a helpful resource, but had some additional questions. Short story vs Novel

How does one decide which to write? Is the decision made before beginning the process?

How would a short story fragment compare to a novel fragment?

How would an editor gauge a fragment from either before determining to read on? (Is the start criteria significantly different between the two works?)

Eager to hear contributions.

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Meredith
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Short story and novel are not the only two choices. There are novelettes and novellas in between.

But, to the original point--the story dictates which it will be based on its complexity and the number of characters, etc.

Though, I have at least once had what I thought was going to be a novella turn into a full-length novel. But then I am a discovery writer. [Smile]

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IINCEPTIONII
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Thank you Meredith. I consider myself a discovery writer as well, and wouldn't have any problem changing the originally intended length of a story for the sake of what felt like a complete story.

I'm familiar with novelettes and novellas of course, and in my head I lumped them in with novels, though maybe not correctly. Thank you for your input!

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walexander
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Cept,

Remember you often have to supply a query letter and synopsis with a novel. And sometimes synopsis with a short story. Editors/agents/publishers are looking for a lot of things in that first thirteen.

Hook, grammar, structure, engagement, concept, etc.

Even more in the pages to follow. The key to success can be as easy or as hard as winning the lottery. Right editor, right subject, right audience, right time . . . on and on and on.

As for length, it's your story, how many words do you need to tell it? You'll find that answer somewhere between rational thinking and insanity.

The craft is a never-ending learning process. It's not for the faint-of-heart. There are a lot more ugg times than there are pats on the back, and even those can seem condescending at times.

W.

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Jack Albany
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For me, a novel, in whatever form, is a series of linked events leading to a resolution. A short story is a single event, usually a climactic one.
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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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Another way to distinguish them is to consider the pacing. When you sprint, you run differently from when you are in a marathon.
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extrinsic
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A short story entails limitations: limited events, settings and milieus, ideas, and personas, and especially limited word count. An ideal workshop short story length is two thousand words, enough to develop event, setting, milieu, and persona identity and transformation, and not be too great a burden to assay.

Hatrack's fragment principle to entice readers to read further might entice readers for a full read, or not. If fragment readers would read further, request a full off-the-boards, two thousand words is a manageable length at one bite. Do Hatrack writers consider the critiquer appeals of a two-thousand word full?

Two thousand words consumes about fifteen minutes time to read per average English reading speed, a coffee break at work, one of the traditional measures of digest narrative length parameters. The digest low end today is about four thousand words, a half hour to read -- a meal break at work; high end, eight thousand words, an hour.

Publishers today and their bean-counter bottom-line mentalities have forgotten that metric. Readers don't much pay it mind either, never did, really. Yet it matters. A subconscious decision process goes into discretionary time budgets for private alone-time entertainments yet a conscious plan to take the time away from everyday life support demands.

Also, waiting room wait times average about a two-thousand word narrative's reading time, fifteen minutes. The docs and all used to know and plan this into their clinic schedules, and stocked their waiting rooms with magazines, whose publishers also knew this. At one time past, the once upon a time heyday of digest culture, this was a life cycle that drove short form prose culture and economies.

The short story form is thought to be a springboard for experimental methods, yay much and no more of an unconventional method will a reader tolerate, yet the form also is from where fresh methods evolve. By the same token, inexperienced writers develop and hone their creative writing skills on the short story or short creative nonfiction essay, and build up to longer lengths, at least long form installment step-stones.

An eighty-thousand word novel, obviously, is longer, less limitations, except dramatic movement more or less demands a limitation of methods and designs to those of the long forms' traditions and conventions for reader familiarity's sake. For instance, a short story may be a one-act narrative, or two, three, four, five, six, seven, or eight -- Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" 2,300 words, is a one-act narrative and only the denouement, or end, act of a lifelong drama. A novel must be at least three acts: start, middle, and end. James Joyce's four hundred thousand word vignette novel Ulysses notwithstood.

Word count proportions per act is also less rigid for the short forms' lengths, more rigid for novels. A start averages a fourth of word count, a middle half a half, and an end a fourth, though many short stories generally adhere to the same metric.

A blunt fact of the matter is an average eighty-thousand word novel in deft and experienced writer hands consumes an average thousand hours of time to write to a fair-thee-well finished draft, as much again, probably more, if yet too raw for publication and writer-editor correspondence is wanted. Not much more than four thousand hours if a novel' subject matter is deemed publication worthy, otherwise, too much effort and resource expense to justify the time.

A two-thousand word short work consumes roughly eight hours draft time and sixteen or so hours revision time average, a small amount less time for drafting and much less revision time in experienced hands -- mental composition, plan development, research, and trials not included. The average typewriting speed is forty words per minute, twenty-five words for hunt and peckers, up to one hundred twenty-five words for skilled typists.

Two thousand words straight average typewritten consumes an hour. Try that, write a two-thousand word narrative in an hour. No thought time possible, straight from the feral imagination to the page. NaNoWriMo's basis is that free-association process. That's true seat-of-the pants, reckless abandon, discovery writing.

Two thousand words' eight hours average to write, fifteen minutes average to read, a lifetime of skills to build: priceless.

Readers subconsciously anticipate the rises and falls of tension and its emotional stimuli a narrative persuades, and subconsciously expect those rises and falls to be judicious, timely, and proportionately paced, more so stagger-stepped for the long forms, yet a tension and emotional arc at least for short forms. Due to briefness, though, a short story best practice raises tension and emotional stimulus soon and fast throughout and satisfies at the end, yet doesn't outpace readers' ability to keep up. Regardless of a narrative's act count, or form: drama, anecdote, vignette, or sketch; the start portion upsets emotional equilibrium; the middle oscillates and raises emotional disequilibrium; the end restores emotional equilibrium to a new-normal life state. For readers, too.

A plot pyramid shape is a narrative's shape more so than an arc, a ziggurat shape, actually. Readers experience an emotional arc that trails the ziggurat's stair-stepped risers and runners up and down the slopes.

A leisure and, at the same time, fast-paced transit of the dramatic movement ziggurat and arc is wanted, developed through deft management of tension setup, delayed tension relief through escalated tension, and partial tension relief throughout, and a satisfying full tension relief end, And that tension oscillation throughout the pieces, parts, parcels, and wholes.

The novel form does that tension setup-delay-delivery segment sequence in its parts as more or less standalone sections. Most any few thousand words part of a novel ideally is itself a short story. Short-short prose does so in sentence or paragraph lengths. All the forms do so in clause, sentence, and paragraph lengths. Short prose, though, is limited in how much and how great a rise and fall swing tension setup-delay-delivery sequences expand. Tension development meets our host Orson Scott Card's "So what?" Why should readers (I) care? question.

In short, the short forms entail limitations and advantages that build craft skills for long form composition and vice versa. Each form entails rigid yet different conventions and traditions and each genre in its own lights. Yet the short forms are more of a challenge than the long forms for brevity's sake. Mindful, all the same, each part and whole of the long forms best practice are every bit as concise, dramatic, and antagonal, causal, and tensional as the short forms.

[ February 14, 2018, 08:40 PM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]

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walexander
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The tendency is with a short story to look for a quicker gratification. Something that says - yes - I'm a writer. But even if you get a quick publish you still need to make sure your craft is tight or risk future ridicule - rejection. Don't get me wrong - short stories are a vital part of writing development. I just understand that want to hear/see acceptance.

A novel is a long, a very long-term investment of time, energy, and ridicule. Your skin has to grow by feet rather than by inches. I can't even begin to explain that pressure applied until you get that first publish. My most wonderful feeling was when I first finished my first novel in the first draft. It is such an amazing feeling, but then - you have to face rewrite and the endless days of releasing it to agents/editors/public/etc., and then what comes next . . .

Its the best and worst feeling for a creative person. An experience few individuals will know. It's agony/ecstasy at the same time, I wouldn't trade it -- better to create than accept your given place. I love math, but couldn't imagine my life of quantum theory without imagination.

I remember recently someone telling me balloon theory for the universe - universe as the edge of a balloon. They said the human mind has a hard time envisioning it. I understood what they meant but saw how it was five-six dimension thinking. It's a mind twister, but I love that my mind can start to see it even though it makes no rational sense.

What a wonder the human mind is. It's too bad so many people try to force us into a box. Rebel I say, rebel! Push always toward the unimaginable!!!!!

W.

well - marriage - children - then book.

[ February 14, 2018, 08:22 PM: Message edited by: walexander ]

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Robert Nowall
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I have trouble sustaining the long haul needed for novels---I've gotten up over a hundred thousand words and still had no end in sight. Several sit in my files, abandoned.
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Qwertyportne
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When I sat down at the keyboard to write my first story, I had it all planned out. Jimmy would do this, Bob would say that, and Emily would mock both of them. As the story unfolded on my screen, a strange thing happened: Jimmy, Bob and Emily hijacked my story! Who did they think they were? I'm the author, not them. This isn't their story--it's mine. They've got a lot of gumption telling me who they are and what they're going to say and do.

Every story I write is like that. And I'm never sure if the outcome, word count and denouement, will be a short story or a novel.

"In the process of putting sentences together," wrote Michael Klein, "a subject I didn’t start with emerges, like Nessie rising out of the loch. I fight the monster, then acquiesce, and rewrite the scene to set a place for it at the table. And there, in revision, writing takes me where it wants me to go, for it knows how to make me disappear."

For me, the difference between a short story and a novel is best described by George Orwell, who claimed that "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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Some writers can plan out the story and get it to go the way they planned it (more or less) - they tend to be the kind of writer who can use outlines.

Some writers hate trying to plan anything and just write "by the seat of their pants" and discover the story as they go along. (Some people here refer to such writers as "pantsers.")

Some writers can do both, but many are one or the other, or somewhere in between.

You do it the way that works for you, because there is NO One Right Way to Write.

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