The difference between writing short stories and novels (part 2)

I started this post yesterday and it ran a little long, so now we’re back with part 2 of the difference between writing short stories and novels.

While I talked a little about some of the problems I’m having with my own WIP novel(s) and the difference in motivation and time management involved in writing novels as opposed to short stories, today I’d like to talk about some of the more practical differences. For me, the process of writing varied so much between the two, that going from one to the other nearly made me feel like I was writing fiction for the first time.

So let’s get right to it and start with the obvious one…

Word Count

No doubt you’re thinking, “Well, duh.” And that’s why we’re getting this one out of the way first. A typical short story is 3000-5000 words. A novel, pending on your genre, can be anywhere from 10-20x that long. This can be totally overwhelming for someone who has never written anything longer than a term paper.

This brings in a ton of potential new problems that you might not see in your short stories. For example, the longer the story, the higher the chance for mistakes. There is a lot to keep track of, and if you’re not careful, a detail you forgot you wrote on page 23 could cause a huge plot hole on page 123.

Revisions are hard for a short story. They are very hard for a novel. And due to the amount of time it takes to write that first draft, you may feel the urge to rush it to publication if you self-publish, or send out that query letter way too soon. Just be aware of that, and don’t hit that send button until the time is right.

Number of characters

In a novel, you can fill your story with as many characters as your heart desires. And that’s okay, as long as they contribute to the story and help push the plot forward. It’s even acceptable to introduce characters that will only be in once scene for a plot point.

But it doesn’t work that way in a short story.  In a short story you’ve got to keep characters to a minimum. This is for a couple of reasons, but one of the most relevant is that with the limited word count, you don’t have time to develop characters as well as you do in a novel. And we all know that poorly developed characters are usually unable to capture the imagination of, or make a connection to, the reader.

Play it safe. In a short story, don’t have more than two or three main characters, and only add in secondary characters on an as-needed basis. One of the worst things you can do in a short story is throw fifteen characters out there, and hope that anyone who happens to read the story can follow it.

Number of POV characters

This is very similar to the point above, but when it comes to writing viewpoint characters, you’ve got quite a bit of freedom in novels. I’d say best practice is still to limit the POV characters to as few as possible, or even one in some cases, but you can still do thinks like have one characters show up for one scene only in order to convey a plot point or reveal something that other characters wouldn’t be able to do.

In a short story, you should should have even less. If the story is less than 3000 words, I would recommend only using one POV character. That is short enough that the story should only belong to one character anyhow. In a longer short story, you may want to have 2 or 3 viewpoint characters, but even that might be risky.

Before you use more than one POV character, really ask yourself how necessary it is. Whose story are you telling? Can it, or should it, be told by more than one person? In that question lies the answer of how many narrators you need.

Scope of story

The scope of the story needs to be appropriate for the word count. For example, take something like Harry Turtledove’s World War series. It’s a four-book alternate history story looking at what would happen if aliens invaded our planet during World War II. That’s a pretty big scope and it took four books at 500+ pages each, plus a followup series to address.

A short story could not cover the war. But a short story could be written on the same premise, and the war could serve more as a setting than as the actual story. It just goes back to what I was saying above: Whose story is it? If you’re taking this example, you could write a short story about one soldier in one battle in the war. But if the story belongs to the entire species and not just one soldier, it’s scope is far too large to be a short story.

Another way to look at it, do you plan to have one character arc, or many?

Amount of backstory

Sometimes you just need to start the story with the character running from the monster. You don’t need to tell the reader who he is or how he got there; just show him getting away from the monster and call it good.

But with a novel, a reader is going to want to know who the character is and why he is in that situation. If a reader is going to make the time investment to read a novel, they are going to expect to know more of the details than they would in a short story.

And really, the same could be said about worldbuilding. A lot of the wordbuilding in a short story is left up to the reader. In a fantasy novel, you might have hundreds of pages of worldbuilding spread throughout the novel.

Closing

And, I guess, that’s it. It’s interesting, and in some ways, frustrating that I’m having so much trouble getting another novel done. Like I’ve said in the past, I wrote Holy Fudgesicles like a short story. I lucked out in a way, because that one just happened to work out that way. Any other novel I tried just didn’t, and now that I’m a little more aware of why that is, it should be a little easier to deal with and get the next book written.

So I hope this helped you a bit, and if you see anything I’m missing here, feel free to share your own experiences writing short stories and novels in the comments section!