Do I have to write short fiction?

Short fiction is ugh. Can't I go straight to being a famous novelist?

Dear Sonal,

All my life, I’ve dreamed of writing novels. I’ve dreamed of seeing my name on the spine of books, pictured them in bookstores, figured out what writers they would be next to on the shelves. And now, I am finally ready to do it, to start writing my novel and make this dream come true.

Only… as I look through all the advice on the internet about publishing and building a writing career, it looks like it would be best for me to write and publish some short stories first and build up my publication credits so that agents will take me more seriously.

The problem is, I really hate short fiction.

I never read it, and the odd time when I pick up a book that turns out to be all short stories…. I don’t know, nothing happens and still it’s depressing and I just don’t get it. I get to the end of a story and I have no idea what happened. Half the time, the ending doesn’t really seem like an ending.

Do I really have to write short fiction to become a novelist? Can’t I go straight to writing my novel?

Sincerely,
Don’t Wanna Sell Myself Short

Dear Don’t Wanna Sell Myself Short,

The short answer (lol) is the one you want to hear, which is that no, you don’t have to write short fiction if you don’t want to. Not all novelists do.

Publishing credits on your CV are always helpful to demonstrate that you are a capable writer and not someone who threw something into an AI one morning and sent it to an agent. And they are helpful for applying for grants or residencies, so that you can get time and space and community and even money to work on your novel.

But they aren’t required to publish a novel, and there are other ways to show that you are serious about writing. If you’ve written professionally in some capacity, or you’ve taken creative writing classes or workshops, that counts. Alternatively, when the novel is closer to being ready, perhaps you can find opportunities at conferences and the like to connect with agents and publishers in person so you can bypass the slush pile altogether.

And of course, there may be sections of your novel that could potentially stand alone as short fiction. Or perhaps you could write personal essays or articles for magazines or newspapers if you want to put together a publishing history. There’s no singular way to do this, so don’t worry so much about figuring out the steps in a writing career, and focus on writing the novel. Because ultimately, the thing that will show that you are a legit, serious writer is to have a well-written novel.

Feel free to stop reading here, because the long answer is that while you don’t have to write short fiction to write novels, there’s a reason why so many writers dabble in short fiction, even if they ultimately prefer a longer form. It’s a really good idea for you to spend some time with short fiction, and even if you think short fiction is dreck and you’ve hated the bits you’ve read, you’re wrong.

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The first reason you’re wrong about short fiction is that looking at your letter, Don’t Wanna, it sounds like you have not actually written the novel, and are spending a whole lot of time researching the process of becoming a novelist.

That, my friend, is classic resistance.

We all do it. We all get deep into overthinking all the ways we should approach getting our novel published, and possibly even get deep into overthinking all the ways we should approach getting our novel planned and figured out, and essentially, spend all our time working out everything we need to do to succeed as a novelist aside from the sitting down and actually writing the novel part. It’s a productive kind of distraction, because it feels a lot like you are working on the novel, and yet it avoids the actual hard bit of writing the book. Kind of brilliant. It’s like running a marathon one day by reading up on training plans and shoes and registration deadlines and wondering about triathlons next and still never actually running.

All of this allows you to feel pretty good about the headway you’re making without having to stare at a blank page (or worse, a partially written one) and thinking “What if this book sucks?” Or “What if I run out of ideas?” Or “What if I’m not capable of writing a book?”

Whether it’s short fiction or long-form fiction, this is the real starting point: committing words to the page and dealing with all the fear and self-doubt that entails.

Now, you can go straight to writing a novel. Many people do. But many people also start to realize that writing a novel takes a long time. Average lengths vary somewhat by genre (SF/Fantasy tends to be a bit longer; YA is frequently shorter) but for a typical adult novel, you are probably aiming for around 70,000 - 80,000 words or so, at least for your first novel.

Keep in mind, 80,000 words is not a terribly long novel. Catcher in the Rye is about 73,000 words, and I wouldn’t describe it as a lengthy read. If you remember sweating over having to write a 5-page essays for school, consider that an essay that length is probably around 1,000 - 1,500 words. You have to do that roughly 50 - 80 times to get to a novel.

This isn’t something you can easily pull together over a weekend, no matter how much preplanning you attempt to do. It is a lengthy, sustained effort and somewhere along the way, you will find yourself in the murky middle, where you have no idea what you wrote in the beginning, no idea where this novel is heading no matter what your outline says, no idea how you will tie up all the loose threads or even what those threads are, and somewhere along the way, it seems like your main character suddenly morphed from Steve to Gina, and you are entirely confused.

This is perfectly normal, but it is also where a lot of writers quit. Novels are messy to write, and it’s only in subsequent rewrites do they take on any semblance of coherence.

Short fiction, on the other hand, is short. It’s possible to keep track of all the elements of a short story in your head, something that’s not possible to do when writing a novel. (If any writer tells you this is possible, they’re either lying or they write shitty books or both.) This isn’t to say that the mucky middle doesn’t happen to short story writers—it happens to me every single time—but it’s easier to push through it when you only have 1,000 words to go instead of 50,000.

Short fiction also allows you to practice all those skills you need to write a novel. No, not grammar, and not silly things like character or plot, but that willingness to face a blank page, to learn to trust your instincts as a writer even when what you are writing sounds wildly bizarre, to learn when it’s resistance and you need to power through and when it’s a genuine need to rest, and then later, how to revise, and how to treat revision like a continued exploration for story rather than fixing up errors.

Yes, writing a novel will teach you all that too, so feel free to dive right in. Maybe your brain is attuned to novel-sized ideas. But you can, in theory, write a draft of a short story over a weekend or even in an evening, and it’s a lot less intimidating to re-read or revise or even start all over again. Well, maybe it’s still intimidating, but it’s a lot less commitment.

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The other reason why you are wrong about short fiction is that you don’t like it, and yes, I am saying that a person’s personal taste can be wrong, deal with it.

I know this because I used to feel very similarly about short fiction. Everything was so arty and unresolved and much of the time—particularly with a lot of Canadian short fiction—I would read it over and feel like I did not get it.

In short, (haha) it made me feel dumb.

It took me a long, long time to realize that the problem wasn’t short fiction. The problem was the short fiction I happened to be reading.

In general, I would often drift towards award-winners, the books that writing people were talking about, and very often I would try to read whatever they were telling me about and not have any idea why they were so excited by this work. Turns out, much of this work was not to my taste.

Drifting a little into Canlit for a moment, there has definitely been a style of writing that tends to be lauded in the tiny world of Canadian literature, and it took me a long time to realize that I don’t really connect to that particular style of writing. Sure, over time, I’ve come to appreciate some of what I didn’t previously like, and thankfully, there is a slow (very slow) move towards increasing the diversity of styles that get lauded, but mostly? There is a lot more short fiction out there than a handful of well-recognized books that don’t particularly appeal to me.

Short fiction also allows for a lot more experimentation in writing. It is easier to sustain something unusual or strange or unique for 5,000 words vs over 80,000 words where it may start sounding gimmicky. This can lead to work that is magical, mysterious, mind-blowing or (I’m out of m’s) deeply emotional or incredibly funny. In other words? Short fiction is where writers come to play.

Sure, there are novels that do experimental things or play with form and expectations in wild ways that are fantastic to read, but it’s much, much harder to pull this kind of thing off in a long work. In short works? You can do so much more because you don’t have to worry so much about keeping the reader engaged in what happens next for nearly as long. You need only keep the reader’s curiosity for “What the heck is this?” for a few short pages.

Okay, maybe you don’t like the wild and experimental…. I encourage you to get out of your comfort zone in short fiction. It’s good for your creativity and good for your craft. Every time a writer pulls off something wildly improbable in terms of story craft, we learn a little bit more about craft and how to work with it.

Tell you what, Don’t Wanna. I have a challenge for you. Instead of avoiding your novel by looking up all the ways to become a novelist as opposed to writing, find five short stories that you like. There are thousands and thousands out there.

Make it easy on yourself; if you aren’t engaged in the story after reading a page or so (say, six paragraphs or so online), you can dump it and move on to another one.

You can start with places like The New Yorker archive, but feel free to look at published collections, small literary magazines, or any other publications that feature short fiction. You can look at any genre. You can look at stories from any era.

Just find five. See if the search for these five make you consider that perhaps the problem is not that short fiction is ugh, it was that you were reading ugh short fiction.

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Back to the short answer. No, you don’t have to write short fiction before writing a novel. You don’t have to read short fiction before writing a novel either.

But I’ll put it to you this way: why deny yourself an entire genre? Why deny yourself the things you can learn about craft by looking at what can be done, the stories you can read that may crack open your heart and soul, and hey, the grant and residency opportunities that would you qualify for by having a few publication credits aren’t too shabby either.

Ultimately, though, stop distracting yourself trying to figure out the correct way to do this. Just write something.

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Readers, I know many of you love short fiction, but perhaps many of you feel like Don’t Wanna. But in any case, let’s help out with some starting points: what are a few short stories you have loved? What did you love about them?