GOING TO ANY LENGTH

by James Lincoln Warren

I spent the last several days attending Left Coast Crime here in L.A. I signed up too late to be assigned a panel, and that’s perfectly cool with me—the main reason I go to crime fiction conventions is to catch up on old friends and to make new ones. As Robert S. Levinson said to me on Saturday, “I’m done going to panels. We’ve heard it all before.”

Yes, old hands like Bob and me have, but lots of people there, especially the new fans, haven’t. The panels are for them, anyway. Most of the fun for me at these conventions takes place in the bar when the writers get together in the evening and schmooze, sharing anecdotes and discussing various aspects of craft.

I, of course, am one of the small cadre of short story writers represented—most everybody else is a novelist. (There are, of course, folks who do both brilliantly.) As a consequence, I frequently get asked about writing shorts. There’s a perception that the skill set required for writing short stories is somehow fundamentally different than the one needed for cranking out novels.

Saturday afternoon, Susan Kosar Beery, who has worked mostly in TV, sat between Michael Mallory and me and picked our brains on short story writing.

Naturally, we shared our wisdom. (I invoked both Rob Lopresti and John Floyd as exemplars of How It Is Done.) Essentially, our advice boiled down to one word: economy.

Not exactly revelatory, right?

And this got me thinking: are the skill sets really so different?

The arguments go something like this:

—Short stories deal with ideas too simple for novels.
—Novels are about major portions of characters’ lives, whereas short stories only show episodes.
—Short stories require greater skill than novels do because of their purity, but novels are more work because of their complexity (and also because of how much longer they take to write).
—Short stories are always justified by their endings, whereas the ending of a novel can go in any number of directions.
—Characterization features less prominently in short stories than in novels.

I’m sure I’m leaving a few out—perhaps the Gentle Reader may supply me with more. Be that as it may, it is my conviction that rather than being inviolate truths, all of these statements are nothing more or less than expressions of preference and attitude. I can think of examples that justify all of them, but I can also think of examples that violate them. Now, as they say, the burden of proof lies with the positive, so let’s just file these concepts under TASTE rather than under FACT.

The only thing I can say that seems to be true all of the time is that novels tell longer stories than short stories do, or at least that they take longer in the telling.

All of fiction requires an engaging premise, narrative that propels the reader forward, a compelling story line, and a sense of resolution at the end. So are they really substantively different?

Well, yes, they must be, or we wouldn’t make the distinction between them. I can competently instruct somebody in the craft of short story writing, but I wouldn’t dare instruct somebody in how to write a novel. I don’t have the résumé.

I have written novels, three of them, but none of them was ever published. The first one was essentially a very long private joke disguised as a science fiction adventure story that I wrote in college to amuse my friends. The second was a technothriller I wrote right after I left active duty in the Navy (now grossly obsolete—when I wrote it, I had to explain to the reader what this internet thingy was), an attempt to reproduce the success of a friend of mine. The third featured my series hero, Alan Treviscoe, a book that I still think has potential but is admittedly something of an oddity when measured by current novelistic standards. I have started other novel projects over the years, but never got fully engaged in any of them.

Commercially, a mystery writer hasn’t actually arrived until he’s written a successful novel—Ed Hoch being the outstanding exception that proves the rule. (By “successful”, I mean the most modest monetary success imaginable—i.e., receiving an advance that pays for more than a hamburger and a Coke.) The most successful short story collections are by authors whose audiences first encountered their novels. For example, Joe Gores, a writer I admire to distraction, told me he considers himself primarily a short story writer, but his best known works are novels, every one: A Time of Predators, 32 Cadillacs, Spade and Archer, Hammett—although I hasten to add that one of his three Edgars was for a short story, “Goodbye, Pops”.

So I’m going to take up the challenge and try my hand a novel, too. Seriously. A novel that I can actually sell to a publisher. I mean it. I will keep the Gentle Reader informed as to how it all works out. And if I succeed, the next time somebody asks me the difference between short story writing and novel writing, maybe I’ll have an answer for them.