Short stories before novel?

[Holbrook]

To quote my agent;

Yes, it is good to have sold short stories (note the word sold, i.e. a paying market) It shows an editor is willing to pay money for your work, and gives a good impression. Is it required? Depends on the novel. A lot of writers have never sold a short story, before they sell their first novel. ( That does not mean the first novel they have written)

So I believe it is a yes and no answer to this.

[Expendable]

I've read a lot of books. Novels to me are not a single story but a collection of stories. Each chapter is itself a short story, grouped together to form one or more story arcs that collectively build into a much larger story.

I can certainly understand why some think mastering the short story form is an important first step in crafting a novel.

[JunkMonkey]

As a reader more than a writer (all my stories fall to pieces as I work on them) I do wish people would write more short stories. I also wish people would go back to typing the things out on real typewriters too, or writing them out longhand. The word processor just encourages waffle. Endless prolixity taking the place of thought and craft.

Just my opinion.

(Which I wrote out on the back of an envelope before approaching the keyboard.)

[Betsy Dornbusch]

Hi,

As the author of the posts in question, I'm happy the series provoked some thought and questioning. That helps us all learn, me most of all.

I'd have to go back and look to be sure, but I doubt I used the word "always". I tend to avoid absolutes when dealing with writing.

Thanks for talking this over. Interesting discussion.

[shevdon]

Originally Posted by hippokrene

Sex Scenes at Starbucks produced a series of 5 blog entries on why every aspiring novelist should write short stories first. You can see them here.

Excerpts

Yes, well. I am with the people who say that the words 'always' and 'never' should not be used in this context. Add to this list the word, 'every'.

SS@S has a point of view, but told me that there was no way, as a first time author, that my 150K word novel would be accepted by an agent, never mind a publisher. This may be a surprise to both my agent and my publisher, as the novel is out in November. Having said that, SS@S and others were extremely helpful in developing my query letter, so there is good advice there. Just don't take it as absolute.

I think the reason that writing courses and such concentrate on the short form is that there simply isn't time to read or review an entire novel. It needs to be more focussed. And agents do look at previous credits, for both long and short forms, so that's a valid point.

Writing a novel, though, is very different from writing a short story. Both are writing, so they do have things in common, but one has different demands to the other. I learned to write novels by writing novels. I have written shorts, but I find these harder. It's different.

If you find that writing shorts helps you develop your writing, then great. If you find it does not suit your style, don't worry about it. Write novels instead. How you learn is not important. That you learn is what is important.

Like the pirate's code, "They ain't so much rules, as guidelines."

[Betsy Dornbusch]

Hi,

SS@S has a point of view, but told me that there was no way, as a first time author, that my 150K word novel would be accepted by an agent, never mind a publisher.

How cool it's getting published. (Of course, I have no idea who you are or when I said this.) My advice on long novels, especially first novels, comes from the likes of agents like Nathan Bransford, Miss Snark, and Kate McKean. My memory might be mistaken, but I think I just read a recent post on book length from Moonrat, as well. Generally most first novels are shorter--especially in this day and age of low risk taking by publishers and agents alike.

I guess I'd be shocked at myself if I said "there is no way" it would be published. If I actually said that, I apologize because that's really discouraging, and I never mean to be that. I have to say it really doesn't sound like me. Stranger things have happened, though.

Anyway, good luck with your book and I'm glad I could be of help with the query.

[hippokrene]

Hey Betsy!

As you might remember, I’m the one who began this thread. I’m also the person who asked you to enumerate the reasons why a novelist should write and publish short stories before they begin to work on their novel. I think you’ve done an excellent job of that, and in fact, after reviewing your blog post, I decided to stop my WIP and try my hand at short stories.

That said, I read the same agent blogs you do and haven’t found the same message you have. In fact, Nathan has stated that if he were to create a MFA program, he wouldn’t teach short stories at all because he’d prefer to teach students to ‘write works for which they might have a gameful possibility of future writerly employment in the current (and likely future) market, as in, novels and full-length narrative nonfiction…’ He also adds ‘Learning how to write good short stories does not exactly set one on the path to repaying $40,000 in debt.’

As for Moonrat, she recently said ‘I would say that the absolute upper limit of OK is 100,000 for a debut novel, but you'll find some people turned off to it if it's anything above 80,000’ but that was in reference to a question about literary fiction.

[Betsy Dornbusch]

Cool, I'm glad you ID'ed yourself and checked back in with the agents.

I don't think I ever said agents emphasize short story writing. I doubt most of them would because they don't make any money off it! (And I happen to fondly disagree with Nathan on his point about the short story emphasis. There is, however, one genre novel masters program that I know of.)

I have gotten personal, emailed advice from Nathan and other agents about debut book lengths. I guess I was referring more to that, and I should have been more specific.

There's always exceptions though, and I don't like the industry prejudice against long debuts. I personally LOVE long novels because I'm a fast reader so I feel like I get my money's worth out of long novels. I think when you look at a regular slush, though, as I do, you begin to realize a solid majority of the stories could be shorter and tighter. I (maybe mistakenly) tend to generalize that to novel slush piles.

Anyway, I'm loving this thread and discussion. I welcome discussion like this cuz I always learn from it.

[Laer Carroll]

I just finished reading a collection of stories by Eric Flint titled Worlds (http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Eric-Flint/dp/1416591427/). In his introduction he says that some writers feel comfortable writing shorter stories, but that the novel always seemed to be the right length for his writing.

It certainly worked for him.

He goes on to say that he spends a lot of time thinking about the basis for a story, and doing any needed background research. That done, it seemed wasteful to write something short rather than a long work that used more of the material he came up with.

But recently he began to thinking of and writing several short stories and novelettes about, for instance, a minor character in one of his novels. Or some theme he only briefly explored in his novels. Or some other aspect.

This especially resonates with me. I have written three novels in my Shapechanger Tales universe, outlined or well begun three others, and am just about to send out queries to agents about the series. While I was finishing up the last novel several short stories and novelettes almost wrote themselves. This weekend I sent the first Shapechanger short to Analog, and the beginning story in an Agent-of-Vega type series to Asimov's. And a completely unrelated whimsical fantasy to F&SF.

Now I have a new routine. When I'm having a problem with a novel, or have finished a good chunk of one and need a rest from it, I relax by writing a short story or novelette. This has the happy side-effect that I'm producing even when I'm not working on a novel. Another side-effect is that I'm learning to write more concisely.

The lesson of all this is that you should avoid hard-and-fast rules about how to go about this hard and wonderful profession, and consider what works for you.

Laer Carroll

[KatG]

What we're dealing with here is a confluence of long traditions in SFF, changing market factors, and conflicting assumptions and publishing philosophies, (i.e. that there's a prejudice against long debuts, etc.)

SF has a long short story tradition. Short stories were the apprenticeship and the calling card of the SF writer. You started with trying to get short stories into magazines (some of them little more than mimeographed newsletters,) and then the major magazines. You graduated to novellas, some of which you expanded into short novels that got published, maybe in a limited hardcover first but definitely into paperback. You did more short novels and then longer novels. You spun off bits of the novels as short stories or novellas for the magazines. Hopefully, you won awards or at least got nominations. You built up an audience. Over years, that audience might be quite large, etc. but the core fans read everyone and all the magazines so SF authors tended to both and were able to sell collections.

The idea was that short stories showed your mastery over language and theme as a writer. Short stories were where you learned your craft and displayed your serious intent, even if novels tended to be what writers were remembered for. Short stories were credits, it showed you knew what you were doing. That philosophy continues today in workshops like Clarion, even though the magazines are no longer the center of SF and have decreased their circulation, and even though most SF writers don't serve an apprenticeship in short fiction anymore. The magazines are still valued, their editors considered dedicated or discerning or both, and published, and even better paid, credits still communicate that you as a writer might have chops and are certainly at least worth looking at for a novel ms. Credits never hurt, are never bad.

But the fantasy category market in the 1960's, 1970's and the shift toward books that started in the 1950's sort of up-ended the system over time. Fantasy writers came in from gaming, from universities, from film, from fans itching to try it. While many of them were also SF writers, many weren't and didn't spend time on short stories and the magazine markets, but went right into novels, with alternate world epics, or contemporary thrillers, comic fantasy and horror novels. And the large waves of fans attracted to fantasy were not, many of them, also reading the magazines. For fantasy, magazines and anthologies have always played a part, have sold, but they are not the calling card. It's all about the novels for fantasy -- long series and grande-sized standalones.

Right now the SFFH magazine industry is in disarray, with online and print mags springing up and going out of business in the flicker of an eye, the major print ones still greatly respected but struggling. Yet, SFFH still has a viable magazine market after every other type of fiction has virtually lost theirs for the last decade, because a decent enough swath of SFFH readers still care about it and like it enough to pay, even though there's free stuff online. So does the writer of SFFH spend time trying to master short stories, hunt down magazines and get credits to build a rep for an assault on publishers, or does the author just go straight to joining the hordes banging on the gates of those six or seven major publishers in each English-language country that do category SFF, with the option of branching out into the general fiction publishers and the small and regional presses that are dedicated to or may do some SFFH?

Nobody's going to be able to give you the magical formula that guarantees you anything. Set paths and step-by-step apprenticeships went out the window a long time ago. So my advice would be to look at what interests you as a writer (which may not be crappy short stories you don't believe in that join the mountain of paper still thrown at magazine editors, which is going to take you some time, but then again, do you really know if they are crappy or not?); what sort of writer you want to be seen as; and all the factors in your life.

It's probably not going to hurt you to give it a try once and awhile to work on some short stories. It might even be fun and it's good practice on the persistence of submission. I haven't been reading the Flash Fiction competitions here regularly, but what I have read has been damn talented, in my opinion. And again, publication credits never hurt.

But the reality is that in SFFH, agents take on clients who have no short story credits all the time, and the percentage of authors debuting without a short story pedigree is such that we can't say that's the operating system of the market. So if you don't want to do it, don't do it.

And as a former literary agent, let me be blunt: unless an agent is offering to take you on as a client, what that agent says about what is needed to get published is of limited use to you. Certainly they aren't going to agree with each other, so again, my advice as always is to drop the search for the magic publishing formula and consider instead what you have to offer as a writer and what you want to offer as a writer. Because that's your best guide, frustrating as it is. Just my view; as always, you're in charge of your work.

But please, while you are figuring that out, please look at the whole market. You cannot seriously look at the giant-sized debuts that regularly appear in Britain, the U.S., etc., and say that publishers don't want them. You cannot seriously look at shorter novels that appear all the time and say that publishers only want long tomes or long tomes in fantasy or whatever. The books in the whole market are different thicknesses, different types, with different styles and settings. They are even promoted with different methods. If you continue to insist that everything in SFF publishing operates as one, with one template, one path, one philosophy, one audience, then I fear you will miss opportunities for your writing. And as the pack of you seem to be, as I said, damn talented, that would be a shame.

[Betsy Dornbusch]

Wow, cool thoughts on all this.

I'm definitely biased toward the short form and ezines, being an editor of a short story ezine. The job rather fell into my lap, but I grew to love it and the short form. Point taken though. Everything is in flux. Ezines are coming and going like crazy. Mine, however, has been in business for over 3 years with no intention of stopping.

There's some wonderful, leading edge stuff out there, much of it for free! There's cheap books available on Kindle and a rapidly growing body of evidence that free online fiction sells paper books. Even the major publishers are jumping on the bandwagon, publishing chapters and entire books on their sites. I think it's an exciting time to be in publishing, both as an artist and on the business end.

Not to intentionally take the discussion in another direction, but there are wonderful opportunities for sf/f writers, especially online. There are more places to read and be read than ever before. And really, in the end, isn't being read what writers want?

[Betsy Dornbusch]

When I'm having a problem with a novel, or have finished a good chunk of one and need a rest from it, I relax by writing a short story or novelette.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one! I write short stuff to take the pressure off, too!

[shevdon]

Hi Betsy,

Originally Posted by Betsy Dornbusch

I guess I'd be shocked at myself if I said "there is no way" it would be published. If I actually said that, I apologize because that's really discouraging, and I never mean to be that. I have to say it really doesn't sound like me. Stranger things have happened, though.

To be fair, that isn't quite what you said and I had trouble quoting it because the post in question has been taken down, as it was from June 2007. I hate misquoting people. However, since it was full of insightful remarks from yourself and others I kept a copy and with a little searching I found it on an old back-up. What you actually said was...

No agent in their right mind is going to take on a 160 THOUSAND word novel from a newbie, no matter how clever the idea. Cut it by at least a quarter--I'd work to get it down to 110 K if at all possible.

So I apologise for the misquote, but my point remains. The advice you were passing on is good advice, but there are always exceptions and this happens to be one of them. Anyway, the remark was not intended to offend and no offence was taken, then or now.

My original point was that when people advise that you must always do X or never do Y, it should perhaps be tempered by the words "in the majority of cases", "usually" or even "with rare exceptions". When it comes to the way people develop their writing, that's even more individual. I was talking about this with an author on her tenth book this afternoon who has only recently started writing short form. She started with a full-length novel of 120K words and went from there.

You have to find what's best for you, which implies trying everything you can and seeing what works best. That would be my advice.

[Laer Carroll]

Originally Posted by KatG

drop the search for the magic publishing formula and consider instead what you have to offer as a writer and what you want to offer as a writer.

Thanks for the very helpful background and in-depth analysis of this issue.

Guidelines offered by other people can give us new perspectives on how to go about our job, but in the end we have to write what we love to the best of our unique set of needs and abilities.

Laer Carroll

[weirdside]

I don't think that it's necessary, but it does help to develop ideas, concepts, and characters. Personally, I enjoy writing short stories, and often use them as a sort of concept map before starting a novel.