Short Stories vs. Novels

Some people love reading short stories. Some people love writing them. Some people prefer novels; I fall into the latter category.

The online courses I take from Dean Wesley Smith all include a short story submission; you send it, he reads it and gives you feedback. I've sent a few in, but not many. It's just a tough style and structure for me to make work. Some people are fantastic at it, and to those people, I tip my hat. But I like to let my stories breathe a bit. That's not to say I've never written any short stories; obviously, I have. There's a whole anthology of them, A Universe of Possibilities, that I wrote and published. But it's definitely not my preferred style.

The thing about short stories is that you really have to get right to the meat of the story; there's no room for an appetizer, so to speak. There can't be more than a few characters, there's no room for anything but the most basic character development, and things get to the climax almost before there's been time to set anything up.

Now, I'm sure that there are short story writers who will disagree with me, and that's fine; if we all liked the same thing, we'd all eat spaghetti. I know there are people who write tremendous short stories; I just prefer the longer format myself.

Then, of course, there's the middle-road, the novella or novelette. By today's standards of door-stopping megabooks, these are practically short stories. They're usually around 20-40,000 words, which gives them a lot more room to work in characters, development, subplots, etc. than your typical short story. On the other hand, they don't drag on in endless descriptions of scenery, philosophical discussions, or technobabble pseudo-scientific backstory. They get to the point, they just take a bit longer to get there. My Cameron Vail mysteries, such as Final Exam, fall into that category.

But for me, I love the longer format of a novel. The best example of it that I've written would be Apprentice, the first book of the Shadowmage Saga. It's intended to be the beginning of an ongoing series, but if you ignore the last page of the epilogue, it can stand alone. Now, I didn't fill it with scenery, philosophy or technobabble; I put a lot of action in there, in the spirit of the old pulps. But it's a story that takes time to tell. It wasn't going to fit in a short format, or even a novella. It needed to be big. And it is, at 75,000 words. That's actually shorter than I expected, but as I said, I didn't pad it out with extra weight. It is what it needs to be.

So, what type of story do you prefer? Short, medium, or long? Let me know in the comments. And if you can't decide, check out the books I've linked above to help you make up your mind.