Short Story and Novel: Key Differences in Form–#AuthorToolboxBlogHop

This week’s post is part of the monthly Author Toolbox Blog Hop. Check out others’ great posts about the craft and business of writing!

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I first encountered Haruki Murakami through his short story collection The Elephant Vanishes. These stories of middle-class life in Japan were bizarre, esoteric, often difficult to get my mind around. The characters were bold and dark. Murakami played with genres of psychological thriller, horror, fantasy, and then straight realism. They use structures and techniques I had not seen before. Experimental, surprising, sometimes alienating, although not my favorite literature I have ever read, these stories are undoubtedly memorable.

So when I subsequently read Murakami’s best-known novel Norwegian Wood, I was shocked by how… normal it was. The writing is mostly linear, a measured blend of scene and summary. Deep emotional engagement grows from its sustained attention to characters, who develop slowly and organically. The story follows a recognizable structure of rising action, climax, denouement. It is a sad and beautiful story, but I would not call it avant-garde.

Of course writers frequently change their styles from text to text, but the extreme contrast I found between these two works by Murakami drew me to a question about form: how might the dictates of these two forms, short story and novel, have contributed to these so different styles?

Two weeks ago, we discussed the roles of mode, genre, and form in writing, and today we’ll return to this question of form, expanding on its role in fiction. We will reflect on the key differences between two of fiction’s most established forms: the novel and the short story.

For context, my background is primarily in literary fiction. After finishing a first novel, the last eighteen months of my writing journey have been devoted to short stories and a bit of flash fiction. These experiences are what I draw on in this post.

Basic form divisions: Length

Form refers to a text’s structure. In fiction, the initial knife that divides recognized forms is always the text’s length. Have I written a novel or a short story? The answer is in the word count.

Novel

A text is called a novel once it reaches somewhere around 50,000 words, although most contemporary novels are closer to 80,000, and the norm is longer in speculative genres. Nathan Bransford has this helpful list of word counts by genre, as well as word counts for many well-known novels, some of which surprised me.

Short story & flash fiction

If the text is between 1000 and 7000 words, we would likely call it a short story. Shorter than that, it’s the form of flash fiction. These shorter forms are often described as “to be read in a single sitting”–we’ll come back to this idea later.

Novella

The gulf between the short story and the novel is usually called “novella” or “novelette,” and although these last two are not often published in the current literary world, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Novellas were historically quite commonly published and read; I imagine they may come back into style at some point.

Length begets more differences

I’ve sometimes lamented that the idea of form in fiction seems quite spare. If you ask a poet what makes a sonnet, a limerick, a ghazal, they can pull lists of rules for syllable count and rhyme scheme, repetition, stress patterns, et cetera. But length is a more impactful measure of form than one might originally think. Let’s examine length’s impact on writer and reader:

Economy

A novel’s length allows writers to develop a story broadly. The writer can excavate nuances, flesh out a significant array of characters, weave through subplots and motifs in a great maze of implication. The extended length of the novel allows for foreshadowing to work effectively, whereas in a short story this device has more limited function.

Sheer barriers of word count require short story writers to work more economically. Short stories tend to have fewer characters–more than two developed characters can be a stretch in a short story. Short stories compact their plots and employ a single primary conflict. The cost of “wasted words” is steeper in a short story than a novel, and so they are cut more ruthlessly. The short story by its brevity must eschew tangents, subplots, and supporting characters to distill a story to its core.

The reader’s experience

The length of a piece of fiction impacts the amount of time a reader spends with the text, which in turn affects emotional engagement. It’s very common for a reader to say that they “got lost” in a novel. When we sit with characters for days, weeks, or longer, it is easier for their worlds to feel real to us. We might ponder their perils while we wash the dishes, speculate about their futures in an idle moment–the sustained, ongoing nature of novels lends itself to this kind of immersion.

A short story, by contrast, is typically read in a single sitting, rarely longer than an hour. Readers know the story will end rapidly, and this affects their level of emotional investment. The short story compresses experience into a burst that the reader can examine in its entirety at once, and it is easier to leave a short story behind at its end. This effect is even more pronounced in flash fiction, where characters can sometimes feel more like tools pulled into place by the writer than human beings.

Experimental writing

A few weeks ago, I was speaking to a non-writer friend who had read one of my short stories. The story leaves a lot unanswered, not only at the end but in terms of backstory and setting–my friend felt frustrated, wanting to know some of those answers, and when I told him that I had conceived of the story really as a short story only, he said something that made me re-think some of these core distinctions between the short story and the novel:

“I guess you have to leave it more open-ended,” he said, “because in twelve pages there isn’t enough space to put the whole story.”

Oh. Oh! Okay. Yes, actually, I had never thought of it in such a clear way, but I think this is exactly what it is. In a short story, we face the challenge of creating as engaging a world as possible in a very limited space. I liken it to a house of mirrors: we use tools to perhaps make the story on the page seem larger than it really is. Techniques like the telling detail, suggestive world-building, beginning the story in medias res–such tools work to engage the reader’s imagination or sense of excitement while expending few of our precious words.

A short story can’t rely on sustained attention by a reader over the course of multiple days or weeks; it must thus stimulate that engagement by other means. When I think back now to Murakami’s short stories in The Elephant Vanishes, this is part of what I’m seeing: Murakami’s experimental writing has the effect of engaging the reader through surprise, through imaginative implication, and this makes the stories stand out in ways that a classic rising-action structure might not.

Resolution and the open ending

What follows from the above ideas are different expectations about resolution. With a novel’s extensive scope comes the expectation that readers are getting the whole story. A novel whose final chapter is a cliffhanger, unless it is part of a series, can be anathema.

Short stories and flash fiction, by contrast, more commonly end the story just before a climactic moment or a key decision. By leaving the moment hanging, the short story achieves two goals: to use fewer words, and to send the reader out on something rich to think about. Whereas a novel might include such tense moments earlier in its structure, knowing that readers are likely to pause, set the book down for a time, digest, but then return, the short story writer is more likely to launch the reader forward with an open-ended ending. The reader knows that they are on their own; there is no expectation that the writer will later catch them and tell the answer. I have had students get very frustrated with such endings in short stories; others love the freedom that they give the reader to explore, a freedom often less available in a novel.

Practical considerations

Writing occurs not in a philosophical artistic space but in the real world. Considerations of time and marketability can have a big impact on the kinds of short stories and novels we commit to writing.

I think most writers are more willing to take a risk in a short story because it is short. There is a smaller time investment, and short stories are less marketable than novels anyway, so if the experiment doesn’t work out, less has been lost. I think these considerations contribute as much as a desire to engage readers to short fiction’s greater penchant for the experimental. Like an artist’s sketch, short fiction can be a kind of study that later grows into a novel, and this makes it a lower commitment, a greater freedom.

Break these rules

But now that we can see these trends in form, rules if you will, as always, let’s consider them before we follow. Some incredible experimental novels exist, as do three-act-structure short stories that sing. Art advances when people try new things. Some reader out there will be moved by a story in a way we won’t expect until it happens. So as with every rule, know it, and follow it sometimes, and sometimes break it.

Novelists can learn a lot from the short story: how to condense, how to imply, how to experiment and upend. The short story writer can learn much from the novel too: its dependable, unrelenting, sustained gaze at something, never getting bored, and its reassurance that a well-known structure does not mean a story is not fresh or worth our time.

What have your experiences been writing different forms of fiction? Do you notice differences in your own style? What about in reading short stories and novels? What do you prefer, and why?

Don’t forget to check out the other #AuthorToolboxBlogHop posts. Thanks for stopping by, and best wishes for the week ahead,
Jimmy