Are You Writing a Short Story or a Long Story?
How to Decide on Length of Your Story
So, what are you really writing? Or, more to the point, what should you be writing?
Defining the Short Story
Short stories tend to run from 500 words (flash fiction) to 7,500 words. A short story only has on average 5,000 words to get your tale across while a novel has over ten times that many words to do the same. It follows then that the short story format is a simpler one. This does not necessarily mean easier.
Novels provide a sense of change, growth and solutions to problems and conflicts. They tend to follow multi-layered story arcs and multiple plotlines that integrate complex themes. “The short story doesn’t have the luxury of depicting change; the closest it can come is awareness,” writes Shelley Lowenkopf in her 2007 article “Telling Tales” in The Portable Writer’s Conference: Your Guide to Getting Published by Quill Driver Books. She goes on to describe the short story as a close-up to a novel’s landscape. The short story is often, as a result, more intense and powerful. Because of its simple immediacy, a short story, more than a novel, has the power to transport, disturb and enlighten.
Renowned short story authors like Edgar Allen Poe, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Somerset Maugham, emphasize the importance of striving for one effect when writing a short story: the single effect you wish to leave with the reader at the end. This is accomplished by selecting events or situations that build quickly into a combustible response.
Jack Bickham, in his book, Elements of Fiction Writing: Scene and Structure by Writer's Digest Books (1993) writes that, "story length, author intention, traditional expectations of the audience, and all sorts of things may affect the form a story may take." Choosing the appropriate length to tell your story relies on the complexity of your premise and theme.
Checklist to Determine Story Length
The following short checklist will help you determine whether you should be writing a short story or a novel:
- does your story have several main characters and minor characters?
- is your story full of subplots?
- does your story contain multilayered themes and story arcs?
- do your characters learn and change notably?
- is there significant change in your story?
- does your story contain several settings and sub-stories?
- does your story explore several ideas as opposed to one main idea?
- does your story investigate several issues rather than making a single point?
If you answered “yes” to most of the above, then you should be writing a novel.
The long "story"...
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