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Here's a question I'm asked relatively frequently at cons and other gatherings of fledgling writers: "Is writing short stories first a good way to start 'breaking into' writing novels?"
It's a question to which I really don't have a good answer. For the writers of my generation (I'm old, after all...), yes, many of us 'broke into' the field by first writing and publishing a body of short fiction, then eventually moving on to novel-length work. For many of us, that strategy worked -- at least I can point to several people who are still regularly publishing novels who followed that route. For me personally, I found that the 'short' fiction I was writing just kept getting longer and longer, that the tales I wanted to tell needed more and more room.
But... I do have some doubts as to whether deliberately starting with short fiction is a good strategy or not. As with every other strategy to learn an art, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Here's how I see them...
The advantages should be fairly obvious: short fiction allows you to learn the basics of the craft of fiction, and has the added advantage of letting you do so relatively quickly. You can experiment with voice and structure, with different genres and different stylistic devices -- and if the experiment fails (as many will), well, you've 'lost' a few weeks instead of the few years it took you to write that deformed and hopeless lump of a novel. (You never really 'lose' anything from a failed experiment; there is knowledge in failure...) With short fiction, you can find your own individual voice before you try writing something as time-consuming and monumental as a novel. Publish a bunch of short fiction, and you have a built-in audience for your first novel; publish a bunch of short fiction, and you have a nice set of credentials to lay out in front of that agent or editor when you're shopping your book -- heck, you may even have an award or two to toss in there. This is all good.
Yet in many ways, short fiction and novels are different beasts. The skills you learn in short fiction don't necessarily translate into equal skills for writing long fiction. The pacing is different: a short story needs to start as close to the end as possible while a novel may start much further back from the climax. The way you build a novel is often not something that you can duplicate in short fiction, as novels use a more intricate structure (and on the flip side, short stories can often use wildly experimental methods that work within the confinement of a short story, but which would get deadly tiresome to the reader in a novel). Scope is different, since short stories tend to use a microscope while a novel uses a wide-angle lens: you can tell the tale of a battle in short fiction, but you can't give us the whole five-year long war. Setting is different: you generally have one or two setting in short fiction; in a novel you might have dozens -- which means that the worldbuilding has to be much more in depth; you won't get away with a painted backdrop in a novel. Plotting is different: short fiction tends to have a 'straight-line' plot; a novel's plot is generally more complex, and has the added complexity of sub-plots supporting the main plot. Characterization is even different: the character arc in short fiction will usually show the 'top' of the arc -- that defining moment when the protagonist's life is changed -- while in a novel, the writer can show much more of the arc. Characterization is generally slower and deeper in a novel.
You don't learn to play piano by learning to play guitar. Yes, they're both musical instruments and in learning one you do gain some fundamentals about music that you can take with you to the other instrument. But if you want to really learn to play piano, you need to sit down at the keyboard and play. Ultimately, if you want to write novels, you have to write a novel.
So I give the question to you out there: "Is writing short stories first a good way to start 'breaking into' writing novels?" What do you think?
It's a question to which I really don't have a good answer. For the writers of my generation (I'm old, after all...), yes, many of us 'broke into' the field by first writing and publishing a body of short fiction, then eventually moving on to novel-length work. For many of us, that strategy worked -- at least I can point to several people who are still regularly publishing novels who followed that route. For me personally, I found that the 'short' fiction I was writing just kept getting longer and longer, that the tales I wanted to tell needed more and more room.
But... I do have some doubts as to whether deliberately starting with short fiction is a good strategy or not. As with every other strategy to learn an art, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Here's how I see them...
The advantages should be fairly obvious: short fiction allows you to learn the basics of the craft of fiction, and has the added advantage of letting you do so relatively quickly. You can experiment with voice and structure, with different genres and different stylistic devices -- and if the experiment fails (as many will), well, you've 'lost' a few weeks instead of the few years it took you to write that deformed and hopeless lump of a novel. (You never really 'lose' anything from a failed experiment; there is knowledge in failure...) With short fiction, you can find your own individual voice before you try writing something as time-consuming and monumental as a novel. Publish a bunch of short fiction, and you have a built-in audience for your first novel; publish a bunch of short fiction, and you have a nice set of credentials to lay out in front of that agent or editor when you're shopping your book -- heck, you may even have an award or two to toss in there. This is all good.
Yet in many ways, short fiction and novels are different beasts. The skills you learn in short fiction don't necessarily translate into equal skills for writing long fiction. The pacing is different: a short story needs to start as close to the end as possible while a novel may start much further back from the climax. The way you build a novel is often not something that you can duplicate in short fiction, as novels use a more intricate structure (and on the flip side, short stories can often use wildly experimental methods that work within the confinement of a short story, but which would get deadly tiresome to the reader in a novel). Scope is different, since short stories tend to use a microscope while a novel uses a wide-angle lens: you can tell the tale of a battle in short fiction, but you can't give us the whole five-year long war. Setting is different: you generally have one or two setting in short fiction; in a novel you might have dozens -- which means that the worldbuilding has to be much more in depth; you won't get away with a painted backdrop in a novel. Plotting is different: short fiction tends to have a 'straight-line' plot; a novel's plot is generally more complex, and has the added complexity of sub-plots supporting the main plot. Characterization is even different: the character arc in short fiction will usually show the 'top' of the arc -- that defining moment when the protagonist's life is changed -- while in a novel, the writer can show much more of the arc. Characterization is generally slower and deeper in a novel.
You don't learn to play piano by learning to play guitar. Yes, they're both musical instruments and in learning one you do gain some fundamentals about music that you can take with you to the other instrument. But if you want to really learn to play piano, you need to sit down at the keyboard and play. Ultimately, if you want to write novels, you have to write a novel.
So I give the question to you out there: "Is writing short stories first a good way to start 'breaking into' writing novels?" What do you think?