What’s Harder to Write? A Novel or a Short Story?*
What the hell, I’m just going to come out and say it: short-form narrative prose is harder to write than that other kind of prose—you know: the kind that wins prizes and attracts movie deals and generally gets all the drinks bought for it.
How is this fair? It's not, really. Richard Ford wrote recently [in Eighteen Bridges magazine, by the way] that a book-length story is more “forgiving” than a narrative packed into just a handful of pages. Because in a long-form story “good writing over here often forgives less good writing over there.”
This is a brave admission for a novelist. You don’t often catch writers copping to “less good writing” unless they are being self-deprecating in that irritating way they can have (“Oh, shucks—80% of what I write is garbage”). Yet Ford is being straight with us here.
Yes, writing long-form narrative is hard too, sure, because at the most basic, bone-headed level, you have to write and write and write and write. We’re talking hundreds of pages. It’s ridiculous. But this excess has its consolations—its short-cuts, if you will. It forgives the occasional few lines of what Ford calls “less-good”. Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative—readers will overlook the most hamfisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next. Mansion-dwellers who write the books we see in the drugstore and supermarket checkout lines have discerned this wisdom long ago.
You have other things to worry about when it comes to book-length prose, is what I’m saying—coarser, more basic considerations beyond the stylistic virtues of tautness and concision. You just need to draw the sucker out. Writing long-form, you are not ten pages into a project before you realize there is no freaking way you can ‘put every word on trial for its life’ (as Francine Prose nudges us to do) and remain sane, let alone remotely enthusiastic about the project.
You think: God, Francine. Are you serious? I just need my character to pick up the phone so he can have his big life-changing conversation. I don’t care about the way he picks up the phone, and my reader doesn’t either. So I’m just gonna say, “He picked up the phone,” if that’s ok with you. I’m not going to put “He picked up the phone” on trial for its life. I mean, I’ve got eighteen more chapters ahead of me here.
Certainly there are writers who can do spectacular things with “He picked up the phone.” But as a novelist, you have to pick your battles. You are tired. You have begun to experience the first ominous tinglings of carpal tunnel syndrome. You wake up in the middle of the night with both hands lying across your chest like a couple of plucked bird carcasses, dead of all sensation. You haven’t sat down to enjoy a leisurely coffee with a friend since 2007. You’re not even sure where the last friend you had coffee with is living these days. You know what, Francine? I’m just going to let “He picked up the phone” slide this time.
And no one who has ever been neck-deep in those particular trenches could blame you.
With short-form narrative, on the other hand, there is nowhere to hide. Allow tautness and concision to slacken over here and the entire edifice slumps over to one side over there. No forgiveness for you, young writer. Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it’s because they don’t have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing. So that’s just great: not only are there no dark corners in which to conceal your “less-good” efforts in short-form narrative, but add to that the fact that your readership is busy. They are looking at their watches between paragraphs. They pick up your story like they would a newspaper, scanning for a captivating turn of phrase the way normal people might scan for a grabber headline. Let’s go, they silently extol the writer, rapidly tapping one foot. Let’s get this show on the road. Make with the pithy. Get going with the well-honed sentence, the exactly-the-right-word. I don’t have all day.
So every word must go on trial for its life.
* This is an excerpt from an essay I wrote for the great Canadian literary journal Event in my capacity as judge of their non-fiction competition, in, um, I think, 2010.
