Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.
I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.
The idea for 'Conversations with Friends' - two college students who befriend a married couple - struck me at first as a concept for a short story. I started to write it under the title 'Melissa,' and eventually, it got too long.
The short story is kind of a precision tool. It allows me a certain type of freedom to go in and out of the American landscape, without having to commit myself to a full-length novel. I find a lot of novels out there very boring.
I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.
For me, it's been a treat to interact with authors who were publishing when I was a young reader. Judy Blume once gave me a pep talk at a writing conference. I had a short story featured in the same anthology as Beverly Cleary. Magic.
I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.
In a short story, you can use someone - we're only going to be with that person for maybe 10 pages, and they can have sort of a one note personality. And in a novel, you need to have arrows pointing more than one direction for that person.
A short story can be really interesting and enriching and powerful, but a novel just contains so much more information and richness and depth. That's what I strive for in my music. I want to create something that's like a longform statement.
'Castaways' was a play on what if a reality show like 'Survivor' was unknowingly set on an island inhabited by a sub-human race of creatures? Readers have often asked me to consider turning the short story into a full-length novel. So I did.
The short story is a very natural mode of storytelling; most stories can be told quickly. I always think of them as like a tightrope walk - every sentence is a step along the rope, and you can so easily misplace your step and break your neck.
I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.
I'd always intended to make 'Far North' straight after 'The Warrior.' We had the rights to the short story, the script was in development, and I knew where I wanted to shoot it. It just took a long time getting the script together and raising the finance.
There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.
We will expect every pupil by the age of 11 to know their times tables off by heart, to perform long division and complex multiplication and to be able to read a novel. They should be able to write a short story with accurate punctuation, spelling and grammar.
'The Story Of A Marriage' was initially a short story I wrote, and before that, it was a family story. It was a story that a relative of mine told me about herself in the '50s, and it was a story that no one else in my family believes, and it might not be true.
Because I really love tax, tax topics actually feature quite a lot in my fiction of various lengths. I once wrote a science fiction short story centered around the idea of an alien tax code, and the idea that you can understand a society by parsing its tax code.
I never really wanted to be a writer. I know it sounds strange, but I honestly believe that I didn't pick the story; the story has picked me. I've written absolutely no fiction before 'The Immortals of Meluha.' Not even a short story in school - absolutely nothing.
A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.
Had Elizabeth Bennet known how wildly Darcy's heart beat for her, 'Pride and Prejudice' would barely have made it into a short story. Their torturously slow-burning romance is a classic example of how men and women still struggle to communicate the most basic of emotions.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.
There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.
I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.
They were a very good form for me - the way a short story has to be designed in order to function, to get in everything it needs to - and they tend to be absolutely chock-a-block full of mechanisms and tricks that writers use to do the things they need to and have the effects they need to have.
I loved 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.' I read it later as an adult, but I loved 'We Have Always Lived in a Castle.' And that brings you around to 'The Lottery.' You can't pretend - it's a lottery in which you draw a name and people die. That's a short story, but it's such an incredible short story.
I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.
The short story and the truth is that I was taking vocal lessons here in New York... One day, instead of my lesson, the piano player and I went into a studio... and we put down some demos... Those demos got to Quincy Jones through an agent... He listened to them, he called me, and we started to record.
When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.
When I was nine years old, I wrote a short story called 'How to Build a Snowman,' from which no practical snowperson-crafting techniques could be gleaned. The story was an assignment for class and it featured a series of careful but meaningless instructions. Of course, the building of the snowman was a red herring.
I feel very protective in the first draft, when all the pieces are coming together. I work in a way that is not linear or chronological at all, even with the short story. I will just be writing bits and pieces, and then when I have all the pieces on the table, that for me is when it feels like the real work begins.
I worked on 'Blue Peter' and 'Tonight' and lots of TV plays, filmed people like Rudolf Nureyev and Ted Heath, and ended up a senior cameraman with my own crew. I'd had my first short story published in 1947, and when my writing really started to take off I decided to go freelance, and eventually left the BBC in 1965.
I sold my first short story while I was home on maternity leave, then began working on novels. Since I was reading and enjoying romance novels at the time, the first two unpublished manuscripts I wrote were both romances. I sold my third novel, 'Call After Midnight,' to Harlequin Intrigue after submitting it unagented.
Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.
Back in my pulp-mag days, I worked from about 8:30 to noon, took an hour off for lunch, and worked again from one to three, for a work day of five and a half hours or so. I wrote 20 to 30 pages of copy in that time, doing it all first draft, so that I was able to produce a short story of 5,000-7,500 words in a single day.
I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something.
The most-asked question when someone describes a novel, movie or short story to a friend probably is, 'How does it end?' Endings carry tremendous weight with readers; if they don't like the ending, chances are they'll say they didn't like the work. Failed endings are also the most common problems editors have with submitted works.
I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.
I've been planning a chunk of time to myself for years now. It's been my intention to finish 'Astonishing X-Men,' 'I Am Legion' and 'Planetary' and then sort of 'disappear' from doing comic interiors for a couple of years. I'll pop up here and there with a short story or two, old promises to friends and all, but no major series work.
Your opening should give the reader a person to focus on. In a short story, this person should turn up almost immediately; he should be integral to the story's main action; he should be an individual, not just a type. In a novel, the main character may take longer to appear: Anna Karenina doesn't show up in her own novel until chapter eighteen.
Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.