Interesting thread. For me, quality is all powerful. I've spent too long editing things that got away from me in the past. But I am a copywriter by trade, and I can sometimes spend hours crafting a paragraph. Maybe I've let that effect my novel attempts. I hardly ever do more than 500 words in an hour. It never needs much editing though!
I can't understand those who say quantity trumps quality. Sure, you can charge through your first draft, but why? You wind up with a pile of crap. You then have to rewrite crap, and that's depressing. On the other hand, if you write well in your first draft, doing a good job with every sentence, then revision is exciting. You see how good you were the first time around. You fix errors and enhance things that inspire you.
Whatever works for you, the final product is the most important thing, everyone has their own way of getting there - if you are completing great works you are pleased with, and ready to send to publishers and agents or doing whatever else you want to do with them then that is great. If you are not achieving what you want from your writing then maybe it is time to look at your way of working. For me a quick first draft works well. When it only takes 60 days to write, rewrite and edit a novel it isn't depressing it is fun and exciting. I hardly ever look at the first draft. In space of a year I have ended up with three novels completed to various drafts stages and a novella (plus some short stories) - also have two new ones one to about 10K and the other to around 25K they are ready for when I get the others finished. They are not really a pile of crap and I was slower this year wasted a lot of time getting into my own pattern of working. I'd need to rewrite it anyway so what is the point ? I never have the story the right way round the first time - I may want to put Merlin in chapter two instead of chapter four, maybe decide my character needs a dog so he isn't lonely much easier to type it in a new story, I usually take out loads of characters, add new ones. Personally I think caring too much impacts on the quality of the finished product, it is much easier to tweak on something that took me ten minutes than something that took me an hour. Could you really delete 30K when you had lovingly thought about every word? Or would your patch the story instead ? or maybe just not include the brilliant new idea ? Or would you just make the falcon white instead of fitting it into its enviroment? For me the story quality is as vital as that of the writing and for me a barreled through first draft makes for a better quality final story - there will in the first draft be moments of absolute perfection because of the lack of thought that cannot be redone and will just be copy pasted and edited. As my writing becomes more practised I can now go whole pages without needing to change much. If I cared about my first draft I would not be able to produce a completed novel in sixty days and the final product would not be as seamless. Although whilst i say my first draft is rubbish that is in comparison to my final draft - my punctuation is improving, the scenes are fun, characters are not bad and story well developed. It just isn't perfect - I could probably just edit and produce an OK book. I want more from my work than that - I am a storyteller over and above a writer and the story needs to be perfect before I care about the writing. While I don't overly care about being published - I have discovered a passion and I am ambitious. Like with my archaeology getting paid was a bonus but it was not why I did the job. I never see the point in choosing something you are not wiling to work to make happen. Fact is writing this way I can produce around four completed novels a year (75K-95K in length)- I have a fantasy series (with the potential for four series of books within it - two young adult and two more grown up), a parnormal chilled out easy going detective thing and a more edgy detective thing, all can give me more than one book. This gives me a better chance of making some level of money out of the books if I get all three published, I can produce one book from each a year plus a general story. So remind me what for me is the downside of this way of working? I can think of plenty of downsides for me of writing more carefully - my final product would be lousy in comparison.
I'd like to second what Elgaisma said, but also add that most people's biggest problem is that they never get around to finishing something at all. I finish novels often, and I'm more encouraged to go through them and edit as I'm already done. And, not to sound cocky or anything, but I think I write pretty well even when I speed write (I knew something good would come out of postponing all of my assignments until the last minute in school). It's more that I don't add stuff that's not important right at that time, such as descriptions.
I don't edit as I go along, but I still try to make my first draft as good as I can. I think it saves so much time. I don't see a point in writing something that's not looked at afterwards. Of course there is a hell of a lot of re-writing later, that's normal.
I agree - I think there is a difference between not caring about it and not putting an effort in. The effort I put into my first draft will make the next draft easier - I will have good interactions, fun story, some description, idea of dialogue etc to build upon. Except for my first, first draft they are mostly readable.
I was musing on this earlier this morning. I'm a short story writer, and when I first (nearly three years ago, Christ...) started seriously writing them, they measured out at about 5,000 words (widely accepted as the upper limit- or close to it- for publishing short stories). In the three years since, my writing style has transformed and broadened considerably, and now my stories are coming out at closer to 2-3k. Now, I think this is probably down to my personal preference. As well as writing them, I literally (not literally) devour short stories, and prefer ones of a few magazine pages in length, because I'm better able to read them in one sitting. It's not that I don't like longer stories, but I think that they should be like canapes, eaten in one go, not left in the fridge half-consumed to finish later. And I think this is feeding into my taste in novels. I don't write them much any more, but I still read them, and with those too I tend towards the shorter works. I'm a particular fan of *whispers* novellas. What does everyone else think? In terms of short stories or novels, writing and reading?
I'm an extremely slow reader, so I prefer short novels because I can finish them in less than a month (I foolishly bought a copy of Infinite Jest a few months ago, and its sat on my bookshelf being intimidating ever since), but with short stories, I don't really mind length. I guess it's nice to be able to finish one in one sitting, but I don't mind spending an hour or two to read a longer one. And in terms of quality, at least among the short stories I read (books, anthologies, not magazines) most authors tend to have an 8-10k word masterpiece surrounded by shorter and (usually) more experimental or less substantial stories.
I'm kind of versatile, I think. I haven't written a novel yet (the story I'm working on right now is, I think, going to be the first thing I manage to get to novel length), but I've also written short stories. I prefer reading novels, but I don't mind short stories either. John Connolly's short stories, for example, are amazingly well-written with sublime prose, but his novels absolutely suck.
I am a fan of short stories. my attention span does not last very long so the story has to be short and to the point. *whispers* novellas? I am not familiar with that. have you written a *whisper* novella yet?
Novellas are somewhere between short stories and novels. The measurement will vary from publisher to publisher, but it's usually somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 words. They're generally considered to be a lot more difficult to sell, since they fall between the cracks: too long for most short story venues, but too short for a novel publisher to want to take a gamble. Though I have seen a rise of the 99p novella on the Kindle store lately, so maybe that will change before too long. I haven't written one before myself, though I'm playing with the idea at the moment. I generally quite like reading them, because they combine the focus of short stories with the space for more plot that novels offer. A middle ground between the two. I hadn't really considered collections. In those, I agree, a mixture of lengths are common (and indeed, I think, preferable). If it's stuffed with stories all of a similar length, then it would feel a little stagnant. Better really to vary the length, pace, style, etc of the stories, to offer a broad range of the author's work. This is the thing. Short stories and novels are very different, and just because a writer can do one well, doesn't necessarily mean they can do the other. Sadly, there isn't really a great deal of money in short stories these days, so you rarely see authors sticking solely with short stories. Rather they cut their teeth on them, and then migrate to novels. Not a bad thing, by any means, I just feel a little sad that short stories are so under appreciated.
More of a novel man myself. I prefer world building, intrigue and many, many unanswered questions that MAY be answered down the road. You can get all three in short stories ( 8-10k length ones). But unless they are very good at doing what they do, short stories usually fall a little short for me. That said, half of my favorite stories are shorts, but I do read a million times more novels. It also depends on the occasion. Slow, cold overcast days, give me a fat book thick with world building and intrigue and I’m as happy as a pig in… But if I’m on a train or plane, give me an anthology or a magazine filled with short stories any day. Mainly write novels myself, but wrote a few short stories for anthologies for a while but found it a little hard getting interested in something that I couldn’t build a world or religion on (Not that it can’t be done).Now, flash fiction I adore. Read so many absolutely fantastic pieces that fill my criteria.
I like that Stephen King still does both. Especially since his work translates so well to screen. I don't write very very short stories, though. I need enough space to breathe. Most of my work I just come out of nowhere with, too. I don't really outline anything. I just start writing, and I make connections after I see that I've written something, and I figure out what needs to come in down the track.
I wonder if it depends on genre then? World building, etc, is a staple of sci-fi and fantasy, and I agree you can't really do much of that in a short story. SF short stories tend to focus on an idea or concept, spinning it out into a narrative, and I'm not really experienced enough with fantasy short fiction to know how they do it. But with something like horror, I generally think shorter is better. It relies on a wilful suspension of disbelief in order to actually create an atmosphere, which can collapse in on itself if overextended (I know it's film rather than literature, but the first two Paranormal Activity films are a classic example of this). Personally, I prefer King's short stories to his novels in a lot of cases. The man is a terror (pun intended) for waffling, and for taking pages to say what could have been done in a paragraph. In a short story, he has less scope to do that, so tends to be a little more focused. King writes terrific novellas for a similar reason.
I find his prose to be uninspired for the most part, but I get a good feeling whenever I finish one of his novels because he tells a damn good story, as far as I'm concerned. He writes well enough that you can visualise it, and he has a brilliant mind for stories. (debatable, sure, but let's not debate it) His short stories are good, too. I've still only read Everything's Eventual, but it was damn good, too.
I am a novel reader AND writer, dont think I have read a short story since I can remember... I prefer novels that aren't too heavy, like between 180-350 pages, and my own novels usually stay around 85-85 K, although I have no problem writing shorter, say 50-60K. Actually since it's a totally unexplored territory for me, I want to ask you: but single short stories, where do you find them? Only in magazines and websites and stuff? because all i've found in stores are short stories collections, and even that seem very rare around here. and If you want to publish one, where do you go, since the publishers seem to only want novels? or do you wait until you have an entire collection? sheez, I feel like such a novice here, hihi, but if you never ask...
Generally speaking, short stories are published by magazines and anthologies, which showcase a few short stories by different authors. Publishers are generally only interested in collections from authors with publishing track records, whether of novels or short stories, as they want to know that people will be interested in the stories enough to buy the collection. But what is starting to take hold is the "chapbook". This is essentially a single short story, published either electronically, or as a little booklet, generally for a quid or two, but generally very cheap. I've only really seen them from small, indie publishers so far, but the idea seems to be taking hold.
Yeah, the few times I've been on Amazon and similar sites, I've noticed stories going for a dollar (well, 99 cents), and I was wondering about that, whether they were just short stories or whatever. I get most of my books freely though, through a library or whatever. I don't particularly bother with buying books very often. I can't afford it.
For short stories, I'll read or write anything along the range of word counts, from short to long. The story dictates which is better, in my view. If you need 5000 words to tell a story properly, you haven't done yourself any favors by reducing the word count to 3000 words. Conversely, if you can tell the story well in 3000 words, then you are just harming the story by inflating it to 5000. For novels, as a purchaser, I avoid short works. They're priced the same as thicker novels, and for my $8.99 I'd rather get a thicker book and more hours of reading, all other things being equal. I will buy short novels, but they have to really stand out.
They aren't always short stories, actually. There's a fairly good market of novellas going at rock-bottom price for some reason. I don't understand the economics of it, but *shrugs* I think I agree with this. Certainly a story should be as long as it needs to be. I'm quite sceptical of this view. Quality is unconnected to quantity, and I'd have said that a short, but excellent novel would be worth more than a much longer novel of a lower quality.
Thanks Banzai. I'll keep an eye for them in magazines then. I understand where you're coming from, but my concern with the longer stories is always that they seem boring, like there is a lot of filler-material and long, boring explainations about everything plus too much flash backs and stuff. I understand that it's not the case with everyone of them, but that is what it think when I look at them. I kind of admire a writer who can manage to tell a good story within 300 pages, lol that is about how long they have my attention... I like a more concise way of writing (both as a writer and as a reader) and almost every one of my fav books were under 400 pages. I also know that there are many of you out there who loves long stories... To each their own.
True, but that's what I meant by 'all other things being equal." If it is an excellent short novel, I'll buy it. But if I find two books and they both look quite good to me, and one is very thin and one is thick, I tend to buy the thicker one.
Yeah, depends on the novel. I don't like boring filler or explanations. That's just bad writing, regardless of length.
