I am not writing a novel.
The pressure to do so has been subtle but pervasive. It usually takes the form of the question, “So, are you working on a novel?” (The “yet” is implicit.)
This attitude is understandable coming from a publisher or agent, who after all wants to sell lots of your books (and short stories do not sell well), but it is surprising to hear it from other writers. Even the editor of a periodical that was publishing a story of mine once gushed, “You should write a novel!” It was meant as praise, I think.
If stories do not sell, I guess it must be because people prefer to read novels. As someone who enjoys short stories, I find this preference odd. It's like preferring chocolate cake to chocolate cupcakes. Aren't they the same thing?
If you try to say what differentiates the short story from the novel, you will probably find yourself falling back sooner or later on their relative lengths. Novels are long; short stories are, well, short.
How short? I believe Edgar Allan Poe said that a short story should be short enough to read in one sitting. All right; but how long is one sitting? As long as you can sit still with a book in your hands? Clearly there are slim novels that would meet this criterion, and readers out there with enough stamina to subdue even fat novels without breaking for a snack. However, I imagine a comfortable sitting to be about the length of a movie: say two hours. Well, I'm a slow reader and even I can get through about 50 or 60 pages in that time—which is a very long short story by most people's reckoning.
In fact, the length of a story is now probably dictated more by what magazines are willing to print, which is usually not more than about 5,000 words (or roughly 20 pages in book form). On the other hand, the shortest novel that anyone seems willing to publish (or buy) is about 100 pages, and 200 is safer if you want your book to be taken seriously – as a novel, that is, and not a “novella.”
Now it seems fairly clear that stories do not automatically become tedious after 20 pages and that novels do not suddenly become satisfying after 150 pages. The reason that so few novellas get written is not that no human stories lend themselves to this length, but that there seems to be at the moment no good or profitable way to publish them. This seems a shame. For there are many novels that should probably have been shorter, and even a few stories that could have been longer. And if more 75- and 100-page stories were being written and read, maybe the distinction between story and novel would be shown to be the arbitrary and illusory thing that it is.
In any case, if the only thing that distinguishes stories from novels is their length, then it stands to reason that people prefer novels because they are long. There may be some truth in this. After all, a long story – a big fat book – leaves you with a sense of accomplishment that a short story does not.
But the mere overcoming of adversity cannot be the whole explanation, either, or we would praise bad, sloppy, difficult books and disparage clear, unpretentious, enjoyable books. And of course we do not do that.
In a more general way, though, we do tend to value the large and long. Other things being equal, a good long story must be better than a good short story, because there is more of it: more characters, more character development, more complexity, more action—more story. (It is hard to imagine anyone making the case that The Death of Ivan Ilyich , for instance, is a superior work of art to, for instance, War and Peace . Even if War and Peace does drag in spots.)
But while we might feel that a single story may never quite equal a novel (30 brilliant pages may never quite equal 300), I see no reason why a book of stories might not. It is true that many collections of short fiction suffer from their heterogeneity. Comprised of independent pieces that do not always complement or augment one another, collections can be difficult to appreciate as wholes; one generally gets the feeling that any old 12 stories could just as easily have been placed between two covers and called a book.
But there are plenty of exceptions, and enough borderline cases – collections of interlinked stories, fragmented novels – to prove the point: Any standalone book of fiction by a single author that invites itself to be read as a single work of art is a novel.
I write short stories because I like them, and because so far none of the talesI'm interested in telling have required 300 pages to tell. And perhaps because I am stubborn. Someone says, “You should write a novel!” and my immediate reaction is, “Why should I?”
But then anyone who does anything so impractical as make up stories for a living has to be a little stubborn. Oddly enough, their obstinacy seems to be one thing we admire about writers. I think maybe that's why, when I tell someone that I write, they always say, “Good for you” – as if I'd promised to continue volunteering at the soup kitchen despite the loss of both my arms.
Craig Boyko's collection of short stories, Blackouts (McClelland & Stewart, 2008), was released last month in paperback.
