Novel Ideas vs Short Story Ideas
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| Title: | Novel Ideas vs Short Story Ideas |
| Creator: | Flamingo |
| Date(s): | March 29, 2002 |
| Medium: | post to a mailing list |
| Fandom: | has a focus of Starsky & Hutch |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Novel Ideas vs Short Story Ideas is a 2002 essay by Flamingo.
It was posted to VenicePlace, a Starsky & Hutch mailing list on March 29, 2002 and is quoted here on Fanlore with Flamingo's permission.
This essay was written as a companion piece to Novel v. Anthology, also by Flamingo.
Some Topics Discussed
- Georgia O'Keefe's art
- original places of publication
- various Starsky & Hutch zines and stories
- Suzan Lovett's art
The Essay
In fandom, we have a tendency to lump all our stuff into one realm: stories. But just like some pieces of art are small, deliberately to make you focus in on them, and other pieces are huge, to make you stand back and feel the largeness of the idea they're representing, fiction is the same way. (I remember seeing Georgia O'Keefe's famous poppy painting, the one on the cover of Addiction? It's little. It's always blown up huge on posters but in the flesh, it's a small piece. Then around a corner was this gigantic massive canvas that took up like three huge walls and could only really be appreciated from a certain distance. It was a skyscape as seen from an airplane, and that is *exactly* what it looked like presented properly. Up close, it was just a bunch of blue and white, but at the right distance you were suddenly *in* the plane looking out over the clouds.)
The short story is a difficult and complicated art form that seems always out of reach to me -- it's not just a story that is told more briefly. That's where the short-story-that-should-have-been-a-novel problem comes up. A short story, ideally, should present an idea, a theme, that is completely contained and successfully explored within its shorter length -- there shouldn't be any reason to look beyond it for more. Every word in the short story should be moving the story forward, remaining focused on its idea and theme. And when it's done it may leave you wondering what will happen next -- often that's the purpose of short story -- but the essential story idea should have been complete enough to satisfy the reader that they got what they came for. A novel can not only explore multiple ideas and multiple themes, but a single idea that is in itself complicated requires a longer time to resolve all its issues. Some short story ideas can become novels, good novels, if the idea is expanded to include more issues, but usually, like in [April Valentine's] story, the art is in making you feel the entire experience in that brief moment. You sit back and go, Wow! Or you have a punch line that grabs you. Or you feel you've discovered some insight you didn't have before. Or you just had a rockin' good time. Whatever.
Go the archive and compare Suzan Lovett's Foster Child of Silence to her longer piece A Fine Storm. Foster Child takes place in about 15 minutes, yet it grabs you and makes you hope and wonder and fear all at once. A Fine Storm took place from the end of the Plague until some point after the show ends. It involves more complicated issues that needed time to be explored.
Most people who write do all this stuff instinctively without consciously thinking about it, but if you go over their stuff, especially the pieces you like the best, you'll see it works out. Me, I had to learn this stuff one step at a time, so I have to make conscious decisions about it, and plan things ahead of time, most of the time.
For example, Addiction was *supposed* to go in a zine -- Nightlight 3 -- but [April Valentine] simply didn't get enough other submissions and we both decided not to hold it up anymore. Even the art was originally done for Nightlight 3, and I asked Suzan if I could use it for the story. We never planned it to be a standalone, and I had no idea it would be long enough when I started it. So the fact that it is a standalone is simply circumstances. Likewise Risk originally was in one of the Nightlights, and other novels--stories long enough to be categorized by anyone as novels, not short stories--have been published in many zines and also serialized in zines. I mean it took me just as long to write Addiction whether it showed up in Nightlight or got published by itself.
Outside of fandom, novels, novellas, and stories are categorized by word count, not page count, which alters depending on formatting and font size. Today, when it is very easy to know what word count is since most of us are working on computers (as opposed to the days when we literally had to *count* the words), it frustrates me that novels, novellas, and short stories aren't categorized that way. Heatwave was published as a standalone zine, but it's clearly a short story. Likewise Promises to Keep is actually a longer short story but was published in novel form. So while those demarcations -- standalone zine versus anthology publication -- is very *convenient* for us to use, and most fans use them, as do many of the award presentations -- it's really not fair representation of the story itself. One of our neighbors mentioned she doesn't buy anthology zines because she's interested in long, meaty stories. Many anthologies are packed with them -- Crystal Blue Persuasion, the zine, comes to mind, which had 3 long novellas in it. For the Huggy, my novella, Crystal Blue Persuasion, was up against some much shorter works, which I didn't feel was really fair to them, only because it had been put in a zine. It could've been published by itself, and then considered a novel.