 Drama: September 19, 2018 Issue [#9113] |
This week: Diverse roles of Short Story and Novel Edited by: Joy  
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“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”
Lorrie Moore
“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.”
Edgar Allan Poe
“A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.”
Haruki Murakami
“Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.”
Paolo Bacigalupi
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue will be pointing out the major differences between short stories and novels.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
Please, note that there are no rules in writing, but there are methods that work for most of us most of the time.
The ideas and suggestions in my articles and editorials have to do with those methods. You are always free to find your own way and alter the methods to your liking. |
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Have you ever written a short story for yourself or for a contest and thought by yourself or received reviews that said that your piece would be more appropriate as a novel if you worked on it? This has happened to me a lot.
At the beginning of our writing adventures, most of us have started writing fiction without knowing the real differences between the forms of fiction. Even today, inside the literary magazines and published books of short stories and novels, writers think the difference is in terms of length but they don’t realize that the difference has to do with content.
Most so-called short stories we read on the web are not really short stories; they are sketches. A sketch is a static description of a character, place, or anything else.
A short story, on the other hand, tells of something that happens to some character, and that character can be a person, place, or thing. A short story shows action. It is dynamic rather than being a static sketch.
A novel also uses the dynamism of a short story, but it usually may have a few static passages in it. Both in the short story and the novel, all elements of fiction are there such as characterization, plot, setting, point of view, theme, style, language, symbols, and imagery, even though there may be subtle differences in the way these aspects of fiction technique are used.
Regardless of the genre, a short story writer will not use any of these elements loosely like a novelist may because a short story is much tighter than a novel. For that reason, it is a good idea to begin and end a short story as near the middle as possible.
In a short story, there usually exists only one action or one event, one or two scenes, and one or very few primary characters in a carefully chosen setting, with possibly an epiphany, too. The use of the language implies the tone and creates the style of the story. Then, everything must work with everything else to enhance and interrelate every element very tightly.
Theme is also important, but usually, there is one major theme and anything additional is only inferred to as an idea in a short story, unlike a novel where subthemes may abound. Also, every short story may have a choice, twist, or a fork in the road inside it. Let's take a successful short story, O’Henry’s Gift of the Magi, for example.
In this story, the main theme is love and it is shown through the selfless actions of the two main characters with one important twist. If Gift of the Magi were to be written as a novel, more subplots with their own scenes, more profound insight into the two characters’ all facets of personalities, and more imaginative ideas and symbols on top of the idea of Christmas spirit would be added and analyzed in depth. Then, still, the novel probably wouldn’t have the precise impact of this short story.
A novel has a series of interrelated events and scenes to make up the plot and tackle the theme. This interrelation and the writer’s coping with numerous events or scenes decide the quality and the success of the novel.
In addition to events, a novel explores its characters more thoroughly and shows more aspects of their personalities. If we look at the novel The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, its major theme is resurrection, but it also has other supporting themes such as love--requited and unrequited--, class struggles, social injustice, fate, family, etc. In order to focus and elaborate on so many subthemes, patterns of life and behaviors of different characters--three of them primary--and a good number of scenes were presented in addition to several settings, reversals, and inversions.
Another aspect is, a novel can be tightly organized and connected or it can be fragmented as in a series of stories that, in the end, succeed to show a major character or plot through their conglomeration. I recently read a novel by the Swedish author Fredrik Backman titled A Man Called Ove, which seemed to be made of loosely connected stories about one character; however, this was only in the beginning. When the novel passed the midway point and ended, I was awed by the strength of the plot and the character and how easily the author connected everything.
We may think we may not have the capability or the know-how of the giants of literature, but with some learning and practice, we can come close to it, and who knows, we may just make it.
Until next time! 
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 This Issue's Tip: Using a fatal flaw in a protagonist or an antagonist helps create the conflict in a story. The fatal flaw is a struggle within a character to maintain a survival system long after it has outlived its usefulness.
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Feedback for "Finding That One and Only Story"
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Christopher Roy Denton 
Hi, Joy! Thank you for plugging my tongue-in-cheek tale of Bob's alternate life! 
Regarding: "Dedication "
Hi, Bob,
That alternate life rocks. Thanks for writing and sharing it.
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