{"id":772,"date":"2011-08-24T09:00:54","date_gmt":"2011-08-24T14:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/?p=772"},"modified":"2011-08-23T21:04:12","modified_gmt":"2011-08-24T02:04:12","slug":"short-stories-vs-novels-in-brief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/2011\/08\/24\/short-stories-vs-novels-in-brief\/","title":{"rendered":"Short stories vs novels, in brief"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week Edmund Schubert discussed whether it’s better for new writers to start out with short stories or with novels<\/a>. While I agree with his answer–it doesn’t matter–I sometimes wish I’d started out with short stories.<\/p>\n

Of course I couldn’t<\/em> have started with stories, because at the time I read mostly novels, didn’t like short stories much, and all my ideas were for novels. (And when I was an absolute beginner, I didn’t want to “write”, I wanted to write “this one book.”) So I didn’t have a lot of choice, and I don’t regret diving into novels first at all.<\/p>\n

But in the past year or so that I’ve been writing more short stories, it feels like I’m improving faster. [1] Short stories are, well, short: I can write a lot of them in the time a novel takes me. I can experiment with different genres, characters, settings more frequently. My critique group can read and comment on the whole thing in one session. I can spend less time fixing the plot and more time fixing everything else.<\/p>\n

At the very least I’ve had a lot more practice writing endings.<\/p>\n

What did you other writers start out with?<\/p>\n

[1] Not that I have a twin locked up in the basement writing novels, so there’s no control group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week Edmund Schubert discussed whether it’s better for new writers to start out with short stories or with novels. While I agree with his answer–it doesn’t matter–I sometimes wish I’d started out with short stories. Of course I couldn’t … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":773,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions\/773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}