VIVE LA DIFFERENCE?

by James Lincoln Warren

My first appearance at a major crime fiction conference was at Bouchercon 2003 in Las Vegas. I was on a panel about historical mysteries moderated by the late Bruce Alexander Cook, author of a series of distinguished novels featuring Sir John Fielding, the Blind Beak of Bow Street. I’d known Bruce for a while—one of his best friends, Chicago Tribune mystery reviewer Dick Adler, lived upstairs from me at the time, and Bruce and I wrote about the same period and naturally shared a fascination for the 18th century.

But Bruce surprised me when he introduced me by saying that I did something he would never attempt—write short stories. He went on to describe the Treviscoe stories as “perfect little jewels”, displaying a delicacy in craftsmanship he could never match. Let me say from the onset that as flattering and welcome as his comments were, I didn’t agree with them at the time, and neither do I agree with them now, not at least with regard to the level of skill displayed in crafting fiction, and certainly not with regard to someone as eloquent and gifted as Bruce was.

But he was expressing a widely-held belief that writing short fiction and writing novels require two different sets of skills.

But do they?

One of the unspoken assumptions in such a pronouncement is that short stories and novels are fundamentally different, especially with regard to scope. I have heard many such pronouncements that I personally have big trouble reconciling. Here are a few of them:

Short stories deal with ideas too small for proper treatment in a novel.

The real idea behind this assumption is actually its complement, viz., that novels deal with ideas too big for treatment in short stories, that a novel contains so much significant matter that it is impossible to squeeze it into a few thousand words.

This is certainly true of some novels, say, David Copperfield or War and Peace. These books cover a sprawl of events and experiences over years and even decades that clearly defy facile abbreviation. But there are lots of other novels that deal with events over a few hours or days that could easily be squeezed into five thousand words—perhaps not as effectively, because short fiction does not allow for much in the way of digression. We’ve all read novels that were shamelessly padded. I’m reminded of the claim that Erle Stanley Gardner, who was a wonderful writer of both short stories and novels, always wrote out the whole names of his characters—e.g., “Perry Mason” instead of merely “Mason”—because he got paid by the word.

This criterion also fails when one considers that some short stories deal with truly cosmic themes, like D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” or Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”.

From where I stand, the fundamental plot elements of a novel are identical with those of a short story—exposition, conflict, development, crisis, and so forth.

Good short stories are plot-driven, whereas good novels are character-driven, since the length of a short story does not allow sufficient room for well-rounded characterization.

Yesterday, Louis Willis had some observations on a variation of this chestnut, namely that literary fiction is character-driven and that genre fiction is plot-driven. It’s blather, of course. (The chestnut, that is, not Louis’s observations.)

I’ve written extensively about this misconception elsewhere, and it’s one I find particularly irritating. To begin with, the terms “character-driven” and “plot-driven” get bandied about by dilettantes so much they have become mere buzz words, usually shorthand for “concentrates on internal conflict” and “concentrates on external action”, which is not what they actually mean.

What is being driven? The story, of course. If the story results from the decisions of the central character, it is character-driven. If the story is results from the character reacting to events, the story is plot-driven. By this yardstick, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is clearly a plot-driven story, whereas Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a character-driven story. Most folks would argue otherwise, of course, that because “The Metamorphosis” deals with Gregor Samsa’s mental and spiritual deterioration after waking up as a dung beetle, it must be character-driven, or that because there is sensational violence in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, that story must be plot-driven. But I’m convinced that if you look at each story, you will see that I am right.

Good characterization, like all good writing, is a matter of sparking the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a story is plot-driven or character-driven. One of my favorite examples of killer character development is the following passage from Raymond Chandler’s “Red Wind”:

What I was thinking was that Waldo had described the girl’s clothes in a way the ordinary man wouldn’t know how to describe them. Printed bolero jacket over a blue crêpe silk dress. I didn’t even know what a bolero jacket was. And I might have said blue dress or even blue silk dress, but never blue crêpe silk dress.

Melodie pointed out to me that this little passage provides the reader with a lot of information about three different characters all at once: Waldo, the girl, and Marlowe. In just four sentences. Four sentences! The poignant ending of “Red Wind” is one of the most moving in detective literature. Not bad for a short story.

Good short stories all have twist or surprise endings.

Now that’s just plain ignorant. Every story should contain something that goes beyond the reader’s expectations, but it doesn’t have to be the whole point of the story in order for the story to be entertaining and worth reading. All too often, short stories are written to justify some telegraphed twist. Very few of my stories have surprise endings—although one, “The Iphis Incident”, has a twist beginning—and none of them depend on the twist to justify the story, except for perhaps “The Warcoombe Witch”. The convincing and wholly unexpected twist is very difficult to pull off, and can’t be expected to appear in every single opus—and they appear as frequently in novels as they do in short stories, anyway.

The sentiment behind such an opinion is that nothing very important can be expressed with brevity, so one should rely on a good gag instead. Now, I am not belittling twist endings nor the great talent it takes to come up with them, only the idea that a twist ending is the only thing that justifies a story being short.

It takes more discipline to write a good short story than to write a good novel.

What this means is that some writers feel they have to take twenty words to say what other writers can squeeze into five words. Maybe that’s true. On the other hand, there are novelists like Kingsley Amis and P. G. Wodehouse who drew every little thing they could out of every single phrase they committed to posterity. Taking the dedication to commit one hundred thousand words to a single tale is daunting, to say the least. As the late great Ed Hoch invoked Graham Greene’s musings on the subject here on Criminal Brief shortly after our inception, “the short story offers the advantage of being quickly conceived and written.” Please explain to me how that takes more discipline than writing a full-length novel. Which takes more discipline to build, a Chippendale cabinet or the Parthenon? On the other hand, which is harder, twenty five-thousand-word short stories or one one-hundred-thousand-word novel?

I guess it depends on who’s writing them. I don’t think it’s a matter of discipline. Every serious writer has to struggle with discipline.

So do these different forms require different skills?

I say they don’t, although I will admit that some writers are better at one form than at the other. I think this has more to do with preference and temperament than with technique and talent, though.