I love stories. But I don’t distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I’m seeking the same thing: I’m seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.
In college, I discovered the Joyce Carol Oates short story ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ which is definitely one of the most incredibly unnerving, frightening short stories ever written.
I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don’t make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves – people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.
I wrote ‘The Hate U Give’ as a short story while I was in college at a mostly white school in conservative Mississippi.
We were living in Denver, Colorado, and I was teaching high school. I asked the kids to write a short story, so I thought I should write some myself.
A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.
You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.
I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.
I often say flippantly that the short story is… shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It’s much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.
I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio.
I think most short story writers, at one time or another, over the course of several books, naturally skirt near the edge of one genre or another.
Well, to be honest I think I’m a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought – whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.
In all honesty, at that time, I never saw myself as an author… I was just a Mom in a state of panic, trying to enter a short story contest to win the prize money in order to keep the lights on in my home.
In anything you write – in a short story, a poem – there has to be a counter-motion; it can’t go all in one direction.
You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
I don’t think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.
Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I’m not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it’s going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
I do remember dancing in my living room when my short story ‘The Laughing Man Meets Little Cat’ won a Chizine fiction contest in 2002.
When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I’d work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I’d work on next, and then I’d panic.
The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.
‘Castaways’ was a play on what if a reality show like ‘Survivor’ was unknowingly set on an island inhabited by a sub-human race of creatures? Readers have often asked me to consider turning the short story into a full-length novel. So I did.
For me, it’s been a treat to interact with authors who were publishing when I was a young reader. Judy Blume once gave me a pep talk at a writing conference. I had a short story featured in the same anthology as Beverly Cleary. Magic.
A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them.
I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.
For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.
Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.
I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.
When I started the ‘Broken Empire’ trilogy, I thought it was a short story, and I didn’t know the beginning, middle, or end of even that.
There was a time in my life when I wasn’t sure I’d ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person’s form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.
The short story is a very natural mode of storytelling; most stories can be told quickly. I always think of them as like a tightrope walk – every sentence is a step along the rope, and you can so easily misplace your step and break your neck.
What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it’s a far harder form.
I used to take my short stories to girls’ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?
Originally, ‘The Windup Girl’ started as a short story – a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn’t work very well.
In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn’t be so hard to write a story.
At 18, my first short story was published – I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, ‘Sweetwater.’
The short story and the truth is that I was taking vocal lessons here in New York… One day, instead of my lesson, the piano player and I went into a studio… and we put down some demos… Those demos got to Quincy Jones through an agent… He listened to them, he called me, and we started to record.
You know, it’s sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don’t make money.
I know for a fact that – it’s just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
I’ve never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.
When I was a kid, the book that I liked the most was ‘Aesop’s Fables.’ There was a version of it that my father read stories to us kids out of. I liked the idea of the short story format.
I’ve made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.
I never really wanted to be a writer. I know it sounds strange, but I honestly believe that I didn’t pick the story; the story has picked me. I’ve written absolutely no fiction before ‘The Immortals of Meluha.’ Not even a short story in school – absolutely nothing.
When I’m working on a short story, I could duck into a bathroom at a crowded party and write a scene, which is to say I can work in a very incremental way.
I often say flippantly that the short story is… shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It’s much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.
I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories – I love the short story.
I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.
Had Elizabeth Bennet known how wildly Darcy’s heart beat for her, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ would barely have made it into a short story. Their torturously slow-burning romance is a classic example of how men and women still struggle to communicate the most basic of emotions.
I’ve always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories – there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.
I love film and, particularly, shorts. You don’t get to see them often, and they’re a great little form, like a short story.
