A confession, of a kind: I am a short story apologist. If I were forced to choose only one form of writing to read and write for the rest of my life, my answer would be, in a heartbeat, short story collections. There is something magical about stepping only briefly into an imagined world, following a cast of characters for ten or twenty pages, knowing that so much of their lives have, usually, already happened before the first page and will continue to do so after the last. A great short story with a perfect ending (I recommend Adam Johnson’s “Nirvana” or David James Poissant’s “The End of Aaron” as great examples of a perfect ending) stays with me far longer than the final notes of a rich novel (perhaps the last image of A Visit From the Goon Squad serving as an exception). There’s just something about the finger-snap look of a short story that gives me a thrill that novels never quite manage to provide.
Which is part of the reason (but not the only one, as we’ll see here shortly) that I die a little inside whenever one of my students, in workshopping a classmate’s short story, suggests, “You should totally make this into a novel.” Sometimes, I audibly groan.
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with a young, aspiring writer (and here I use the phrase ‘young writer’ not to refer to an actual, biological age, but a level of writing experience) trying their hand at a novel. Many writers have had success leaping first into novel writing rather than taking a different route (the route I’m going to propose here momentarily), but I am convinced, for a number of reasons, that most aspiring writers will have a more successful time, and a more pleasant one, if they work to become a capable short story writer first, which is why I would make the case that students should emphasize the short form for as long as possible before turning to the long form.
Over the last nine years, thanks to having read over three hundred students’ stories in my Fiction Writing course during that span, I’ve developed a pretty lengthy list of the major craft skills that students coming into their early writing courses need to work on the most. These include scene setting, character development, the craft of an ending, and strong deployment of dialogue—among many more (as we all know, writing is hard, hard work, because great writers somehow manage to balance and deploy oodles of skills seemingly all at once in their art). I can’t think of a single one of these that a student would be better suited to develop via the long form than short.
Let’s take perhaps the most obvious of these concerns that works best if developed in short form: working toward an ending. My dissertation adviser in graduate school said, of endings, one of the things that has most stuck with me throughout my writing life (and which he was probably pilfering it from someone else, as one is wont to do with useful writing advice): an ending must be both inevitable and unexpected. Upon first consideration, this seems like an impossible contradiction. How can something that is inevitable, meant to be, come as an unexpected surprise? Shouldn’t we expect something inevitable? How can the two coincide? What this witty turn of phrase really means, of course, is that upon experiencing a story’s end, a reader should, after the fact, recognize that this was the destination toward which it was moving the entire time—that there was no other way for the story to end. As we get there, however, readers should not easily anticipate, and writers should not overly telegraph, that destination. We should feel a sense of wonder and surprise, but afterward realize that where we ended up was the only place the plane could land, so to speak.
It’s a hard thing for students—and not just this, but the very fundamental ability to find a story’s ending. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read a student’s workshop piece and it simply stops rather than actually ending; during workshop, the writer inevitably shrugs or, for the more introverted, looks around sheepishly, and admits that they didn’t know how to wrap up their story, or where to go next. Of course, I say: this is because endings are quite difficult, often the most challenging part of a great piece of fiction.
So why would you try to master them by writing something that takes two hundred pages to get there rather than ten? I do, periodically, teach a Book Writing Workshop, a course that mostly emphasizes production of material rather than critique thereof, and even with that focus on plunking words on the page, almost no students manage to fully realize their novel or memoir over the course of the fifteen-week term. As an exercise in mastering scope and the full range of a story’s arc, a novel is not the way to go.
Something similar can be said about several other fundamental craft techniques. My students often have trouble deciding when and where to utilize narrative scene versus exposition; this is so much easier to develop and discuss through the lens of short fiction than novel, simply by virtue of the fact that students can dwell carefully in scene in a ten page piece of writing more easily than in one that’s triple-digit in length. Thinking about the role of dialogue, and what to express through an exchange between characters, is far more manageable in a piece where said dialogue is part of a small window into a character’s life than part of a much longer, book-length story. After all, every piece of a story—regardless of its length—is meant to speak to and knit to the others, and how to teach students how to create that knittedness if they don’t have the time or ability to write the whole story?
I’ll end with an analogy I like to make when students complain about not being allowed to work on book-length work in my fiction writing courses: look at the training and development of marathon runners. No one starts their career as a professional marathoner by going out and running 26.2 miles the first time they train. No: there’s a building process. First, runners master the mile. Then the 5k, the 10k, the half-marathon. (Or some sequence like that; although I run, I’m hardly a professional with a regimented training block schedule, but you get my drift.) Those athletes build up to their marathons; they don’t start there. Similarly, creative writing students should start small, pushing themselves to learn the craft of short stories first, before they embark on their novelistic dreams.
Joe Baumann, Member
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