Monday means Jan
Christensen is back today with another informative post. Apparently, the
difference is more complicated than novels have a lot more words.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN A
SHORT STORY AND A NOVEL
An easy way to visualize the difference between writing
short or long is to think of pencil sketches for the short story
scene--everything is there, but the details are scanty. Each scene is fully developed, with dialog, a
bit of description/setting, and what the characters are feeling and how they're
acting. Usually the time frame is short
and the viewpoint is all one character's.
For example, a sketch of a kitchen with the sun shinning in
the window (time of day, maybe season), one person facing the viewer (VP
character), the background sketchy (pun intended), people black and white, but
dressed (or maybe not, if it's that kind of story), but the clothes are
probably not that important. If they
are, there's more detail--more lines drawn to indicate type of clothing. Each character wears a certain
expression--the viewer can pretty much tell what each one is thinking.
A novel is more of a series of oil paintings. Each one has a colorful background (description/setting),
the characters are vivid, and each succeeding painting can be shown with
different viewpoint characters and over a longer span of time. The sun is shining in the first picture, but
the moon is hanging high in the sky later on.
The tree outside can have leaves one time, and none later on. Different characters are the focus of each
painting, indicating a change of VP.
Clothing is interesting, and sometimes important to the story.
Each kind of story, whether short or long, has its own special
pull. The quick sketches of a short
story where the reader gets to add her own details to fill out the story, but
where the story is over quickly. The oil
paintings of the novel where the artist puts in everything for the reader, so
the reader can go along with the writer more, and where the story is much
longer with more characters, more settings/descriptions, more dialog, even
subplots.
If you are a visual person when writing and reading, as I
am, this metaphor for the differences between writing long and short can help
you, I believe, with each scene. While
writing a short story, see the scenes as pencil sketches and "report"
what you see. While writing a novel, see
each scene as an oil painting with all its rich detail, and get it all
down.
I was writing a short story a while ago, and about halfway
through realized I'd put in nothing about setting or the weather. It came to me then that a short story is more
like a pencil sketch than a novel, and so I stopped what I was doing to write
this essay. After I finished the essay,
I fleshed out the setting and weather details in the story with only a few sentences.
Then, when I wrote “the end” to the story, I felt as if I
did a complete job of it. Anyone else tend to forget mentioning settings enough,
and the weather? Sometimes they really don’t matter that much, in my opinion.
But I bet some readers disagree with that.
Jan Christensen ©2017
Jan Christensen lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, and has had
nine novels and over seventy short stories published. www.janchristensen.com
