Ever since I signed up for Audible last year, I have been using it as a vessel for listening to books that I normally wouldn’t. Not to say the books I listen to are bad (for the most part), I just find it easier to listen to non-fiction books than read them. And when I read with my eyes, it requires my full attention, so I want those books to be worthwhile of my time. I can go through a few audiobooks a month just commuting around, meaning I can be a little more experimental. I have heard several great books this way, but there have been a few flops too.
And those books are what I want to talk about briefly in this post. This will probably be more of a rant than previous posts, but I feel the need to point this out to any authors (aspiring or otherwise) who read it.
Novels vs. Short Stories
One of the audiobooks I listened to about a month ago was On Writing by Stephen King. Some of the info is outdated these days since the publishing industry has changed significantly since the book was released in 2000, but his thought process about what makes stories good or bad is still relevant. I agreed with almost everything he had to say about the subject of storytelling, and I intend to keep it to heart in the future. And it clearly pointed out what was wrong with some of the other books I’ve read in the past couple years.
I think that the biggest mistake an author can make is assume that his or her story is a novel when it’s really a short story. There are a lot of reasons to want a story to be a novel, namely that short stories don’t sell well on their own, but taking a short story and stretching it out into a novel is not the right answer.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is highly regarded by most, it even won a Pulitzer, but I think it is a perfect example of a novel that is really a short story. The novel is already short to begin with, but I was bored to tears by the end of it. There are a few great moments in the book, but those only cover about 5% of the whole story. The other 95% is meandering, repetitive, and ultimately uninteresting. At least it was to me. I think if it had just focused on that 5%, it would’ve been an amazing short story that I would’ve loved.
Another popular “novel” recently has been Wool by Hugh Howey. I say “novel” because it’s really a collection of short stories that form a full narrative. The very first part, only about 10 pages long, is fantastic, and holds up as a great short story by itself. But then he continued with the story and it ended up boring by the end. I’m not saying that he shouldn’t have made more short stories after the first one, but they probably would’ve been better if they had not focused on the one silo, or if they had been not in the same timeline. I don’t know what the right answer would’ve been, but the plot just felt forced after the first part.
I don’t want this to become a beat down of books that I think were boring and overstayed their welcome, so I will leave it at just those two. There have been others, and with each one I endure, I get better at detecting it early on. With the last book I listened to, I could tell from the first chapter that it was going to be a book that could’ve been a short story based on how it was written. And I was totally right. The only reason I finished it was because it was a prime example of how not to write. If I ever detect my writing gets that bad, I will punch myself in the face and fix it.
So authors, I want to make a request. If you think you have a great idea for a story, I want you to really think about how much you can actually get out of that idea, and just focus on the best bits. Automatically assuming something is a novel is a bad practice. I know because I’ve done it myself. And in all of those cases where I assumed badly, I didn’t even finish the story because I got so bored with it myself. That should be a big hint.
I think what makes for a good indicator is this: If you have an idea that you can get five short stories out of, then you probably have something good enough to be a novel. Otherwise, just go with the short stories. If it truly is a good idea, you can get several of them out, and then it becomes a novel just like that.
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So yeah, mostly just a rant today. I’m actually working on a short story, so I’m focusing more on that than other things. Hopefully it will turn out well. I’m pretty confident it will. Until next week!