The Short Story vs. The Novel

[Lauren Hynde]

There is a world of difference between a novel and a novel-length story. There is a world of difference between a short story and a truncated novel scene. No matter how enjoyable each of the four things might be to read or write.

 

[Penelope Street]

I guess you don't know how to write a short story, then? ( shakes head several times )

Well, I guess I don't know how to either. If you pinned me down, I'd venture that a short story features a central character experiencing, and being changed by, a brief series of events. I don't really care so much if I've been writing novellas instead of short stories- I just want to write the best story I can. I've never fretted too much about word count before either. If I am working up to writing novel-length tales, that's ok, but I want to understand what I may want to change when penning longer works.

When I said my stories were getting longer and that I enjoyed tales in the 10,000-15,000 word range, I had in mind erotic stories. The only two stories I wrote last autumn were both about 3000 words. There are single-page stories on Lit that I've enjoyed, Selena's discussion story for example. One by Unsung Muse also comes to mind, but neither of these were erotic- at least not to me. While I enjoy shorter stories, few arouse me in the manner a longer one can. For eroticism to work, I need to get to know the characters and be with then when they overcome their obstacles, otherwise I won't be there when they enjoy their reward.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

I don't really care so much if I've been writing novellas instead of short stories- I just want to write the best story I can. I've never fretted too much about word count before either.

And that's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with novellas, quite the contrary. I think that it helps, though, to know what you're writing, because different elements work for different-length-stories. To quote (and adapt) what someone said on the poetry board recently, "Furniture, for example, doesn't just 'flow out of the soul' of a carpenter. He's gotta know how to use the tools, what the various kinds of joints are, know something about different woods, etc." Intuition, emotion, it's all great, but writing is also craft. It helps to know your tools.

 

[neonlyte]

And that's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with novellas, quite the contrary. I think that it helps, though, to know what you're writing, because different elements work for different-length-stories. To quote (and adapt) what someone said on the poetry board recently, "Furniture, for example, doesn't just 'flow out of the soul' of a carpenter. He's gotta know how to use the tools, what the various kinds of joints are, know something about different woods, etc." Intuition, emotion, it's all great, but writing is also craft. It helps to know your tools.

It is possibly also true that 'we' can get too hung up by 'the tools'. Maybe I'm odd, but I rarely plan my stories and I've only once specifically set out to write a short (less than 2k) story. Most of my longer works develop out of a single scene and I often have no idea where the story will take me when I set out. I'm undisciplined in the drafting, which probably explains why it is taking me two years to edit and re-write a novel length work, though I've completed two other novel length drafts in the same two years.

I find I need to leave three-months between full edits to cut out the crap. It's easier to see from a distance Hopefully, I'll get better at this. My last draft novel is probably the best I've written, (in terms of limiting superfluous content) I'll let you know when I pick it up again around Easter time.

 

[Fallenfromgrace]

Nice debate, i am an inexperienced writter, but i write for the way it makes me feel, and i hope my audience feel some of that too. I find it difficult to write concisely- especially fiction.

I've been 'forced' based on what i as a read er would rather see, to split one of my stories into 'parts' and within these parts, there are clearly marked Chapters. I tend to write with an in depth focus on just 2 main characters, and this continues for some time before periphery characters enter the plot- and they're weighting as a character differs depending on their relation to the main characters.

It's not that i write immens amounts of description on something- taking a paragraph to describe someone entering a room...or anything like that. Just, for me i like to write a lot of 'non sexual interaction' before the carnal intimacy takes place. For example...most of my stories so far range from 150 words to 4000 words before foreplay occurs. Sure, they may kiss a couple of times throughout this buildup, but that's really all.

Anyway, my point is this, to me, i really like to read background get a feel for the characters, and all my feedback has commended on me giving this 'closeness' to the readers. I think a novel is a complex honeycomb of subplots, dramatic irony and an intricate web of characters interlinekd in many ways that are not apparent on the surface. this for some readon brings to mind 'An inspector Calls'- short and concise, but intricate too.

I have a question to put forward, and it is inextricably linked to 'length' of writting. Is there such a thing as 'thinking too much' about a course of events, about the characters internal workings etc, as you the author write it?

(for my long pieces ive started using character sheets- mainly to keep consistent. I also tend to plan in great detail a chapter how i want it to flow and what should occur, down to minute details like the level of lighting in every area...)

 

[Lauren Hynde]

I have a question to put forward, and it is inextricably linked to 'length' of writting. Is there such a thing as 'thinking too much' about a course of events, about the characters internal workings etc, as you the author write it?

Personally, I don't think there is such a thing as thinking too much about a story.

(Except in the case of CharleyH there, when she spends so much time thinking about Chapter 3 of her novel, editing it over and over, adding scenes and cutting scenes, that she never gets to writing a single line of Chapter 4. )

Knowing your characters intimately is always good, and if you start writing having a precise idea of the elements you want to include in your story, scenes, dialogue lines, symbology and semiotics, even better. It will make your job of putting the words into paper that much easier. But I do think there is such a thing as showing too much that you thought about it. Just because you have a detailed biography of each of your characters and know what they had for lunch on June 12, 1972, it doesn't mean you need to include that information in the story. It may have been relevant to this character's personality formation, but not to the story at hand.

 

[Verdad]

I've read this topic with interest, but I'm not sure how much I'm able to contribute. I've always had a special liking for short fiction, so I guess I'm well acquainted with the general subject, but the key word here is erotic short fiction, and that's a different thing yet.

The problem of writing erotic/porn stories at the pace of novels is common indeed, but I don't know if I have any wise words on how to avoid it. Perhaps for some authors it stems from the lack of understanding of short story as a form, but I dare say a lot of it stems from specific demands of the genre, too.

In a "regular" short story that just happens to contain sex, the sex will be portrayed in broad strokes, with the same economy that's applied to the rest of the story. No dilemma here—a detailed, protracted description of sex would seem as out of place as if the writer suddenly dedicated two pages to describing furniture.

But in a story that strives to be erotic/pornographic (i.e. has an express purpose of arousing the reader), we often do want the full sex scene, from all the obvious reasons, and that's what creates troubles. That's what, unfortunately, often feels like shifting gears, as if a scene from a novel is stuffed in a short story.

I truly don't know an easy answer to this, though. Sometimes it's almost as if graphic sex defies short format. Or at least blurs our judgment…

But I guess a lot of it is in consistency. If one has a strong story that moves along quickly, it's best to reconcile the pace of sex scene/s with that and have them move equally quickly, but if one has a great sex scene, I guess it's either moving toward a longer format by bringing the rest of it to the pace of the sex scene/s, or, on the contrary, making sure that the scene is the story.

Among a lot of spot on things that Lauren said, I particularly liked this one:

Which means that in my opinion, you can't have an erotic / pornographic short story (as opposed to a novella or novel), unless the sex scenes are very much the plot and the character development - which is definitely not as easy or simplistic as it might sound, and quite different from having sex scenes without plot or character development.

Yes, that's what I think too, and it's not easy at all. Not at all.

I agree too that the cult of character isn't necessarily helping erotic shorts. This is a problem more common with better, more experienced writers, who truly create engaging characters, but then have nothing better to do with them than make them fuck. The result is usually that of disparate stories or even forms appearing jammed into one, setting the wrong kind of expectation and hence often disappointing both as 'literature' and as smut.

I'm not above this, though, so I can pretty much only concur that yes, it is a problem worth thinking of and keeping in mind.

Verdad

 

[DocCIS]

Being a first time poster, long time lurker (yeah, it's a bit cliche), I am particularly interested in this topic. I have a story I've been writing now close to 4 years. It started off as an idea, almost a fantasy, and suddenly breathed a life of its own.

Although I had the original first sex scene in my mind, background was extremely important...so I started writing that part first, and things grew in immense proportion. I was not interested in defining it as a short story, novella, or even a novel, I was writing for the enjoyment...and the story took on a life of its own. Before the first "sex" scene was ever written it was well over 10K words. I've since broken it into chapters with the total story--in my mind not even halfway complete--currently close to 75K words. By pure definition, would this be a novel? I'm sure by the time I'm completely satisfied with its "end" it will be well close to 150K words, but do not know if I would label it a "novel" based upon length alone.

To me, a novel is a story which, broken into many chapters, none can stand alone. Each chapter leads into the next, all interlinked. This is my difference between a novella/novel and a short story.

Many short stories have multiple chapters on this site; however, when you read each one, they can each stand alone as a "story." Although the other chapters help with the essence of the complete story, each one is not exclusively dependent upon the other. Some authors give teasers and foreshadowing towards the next chapter to keep them interlinked, but in the end, they are loosely tied together, with the sex act(s) being the gist of the chapters. There is little character development short of content to lead towards the next sex scene.

When I think of a novel, I think in terms of classics, Tale of Two Cities, Lord of the Rings, War and Peace...books that have a common goal and centralized story. None of the sections can stand alone, but instead need the entire story combined to reach the conclusion. Even with stories here being erotica, the sex scenes may be the "meat" of the story, but the story as a whole is what makes it complete. If the sex scenes define the chapter, it is a short story in my mind. If the sex scenes only add depth and perception to the characters and build/advance those characters further into the story, then it is a novella/novel...

 

[SesameStreet]

Short Story = 1-15K-ish
Novella = 15-50K-ish
Novel = 50K-ish and up

The difference? Word count.

As far as E-Publishers are concerned this is the answer in a nutshell. It is Word Count and an In-depth plot that makes a Short Story a Novella.

 

[SimonBrooke]

H'mmmmm

This is where we always differ. Content always demands form. If it's meant to be a short story, it will be a short story. If it's meant to be a novel, it will be a novel. And if it's meant to be that damnable novella, then that's what it's gonna be.

Ever try to force a story into something it shouldn't be? Make it longer, make it shorter? It's often like fitting a round peg into a square hole. If the story flowed naturally from writer to page, it will be the length it should be when it's all said and done.

If it was forced, as a reader, I'll know it, and it will either be painful to read and I'll read it anyway (for whatever reason) or I'll stop. Usually the latter.

I'm not really comfortable with the distinctions that are being made here.

What we're talking about is narratives. There is a continuity of narratives from fifty-word flash-fiction pieces through to the bloody Silmarillion. Over the centuries different narrative traditions have evolved different ways of packaging narratives.

Pre-literate Europe certainly had extended narratives as represented by (e.g.) Beowulf, or the Prose Edda. I'm not clear if these narratives were told in a single 'sitting', or if they were told it segments over a series of sessions - Beowulf, at least in modern transcriptions, is divided into chapters. But in any case some of them are, by modern standards, novel length.

Many of these narratives had rhyme or metre, probably as a mnemonic aid to the illiterate bard who had to remember and reproduce the whole piece. Out of that tradition you get the high medieval troubadors, and the development through their tradition of (e.g.) the Matter of Britain, which when all stitched together is an enormously extensive narrative. At the same time you get people (Chaucer, Dante) putting together related collections of short narratives - tales which individually could be told at a sitting, but bound together in narrative frameworks which clearly could not.

The novel, as such, is an eighteenth century invention based on the length of narrative that could conveniently be packaged into a small number of octavo volumes. It's size is arbitrary, and is technologically determined.

The size of a short story has also been largely set by a market constraint, about how long a text can be inserted into a magazine and still leave room for other interesting articles. Again, the constraint is arbitrary.

Obviously you can do more with more words. But it is completely untrue to suggest that longer narratives do not require concision. Good writing always demands concision and density of meaning. And there is no limit to what you can tackle in a narrative of any length, except your own skill as a narrator. And the right length for a narrative is as long as it takes you, as narrator, to tell the story you're trying to tell.

Yes, of course you can look at a corpus of narratives, sort the wheat from the chaff, and make generalisations about the difference. But as soon as you turn those generalisations into normative rules you limit the narratives you're prepared to consider as 'good'; and, if you're influential, you also limit the narratives that people are willing to submit to public scrutiny. The publishing industry has done that for years. And it's because it's done it for years that most of the really ground-breaking narratives of our generation were rejected by publisher after publisher before finally being accepted. Great narrations always break normative rules.

Once upon a time there were technological reasons for preferring narratives of particular lengths. With the arrival of the cheap paperback, and especially with the arrival of electronic dispays of text, there really aren't, any longer. It may be that there are still underlying psychological reasons for preferring particular lengths (Lauren referred to stories which could comfortably be read in one sitting). But, under the new technological circumstances, unless we experiment with forms we aren't really going to know whether there are preferred lengths or what they are.

I've read some pretty extended pieces on Literotica; Varian's Changed Girl and Otto's African Adventure both spring to mind. I don't at all believe that - for people who are used to it - reading from the screen is systematically more difficult than reading from a book (although I can't yet take my screen into the bath).

What I'm saying is that I think we're in a period when there is more room than ever to experiment with appropriate lengths for narratives; and I think this is a really inappropriate time to be talking about arbitrary length-based categories like 'short story' or 'novel',

Having said that, of course, I'm currently polishing up two novel length pieces I intend to try to find a publisher for this year ;-)

 

[SimonBrooke]

There is a world of difference between a novel and a novel-length story. There is a world of difference between a short story and a truncated novel scene. No matter how enjoyable each of the four things might be to read or write.

Could you elaborate on the difference?

 

[Lauren Hynde]

Could you elaborate on the difference?

I thought I had on every post I made prior to that one.

 

[mjl2010]

Ok everyone laugh because it says "Virgin" under my name. Good we got that out of the way.

I read so many criticisms in AH and other places. The sex happens too fast. Not fast enough. Too much background. Not enough background. Too long. Too short. Clumsy. And then the stories where the author hasn't a clue about grammer, verb tense or anything like that. I imagine they get pounced on and some never come back. Even me lurking here so long and finally creating an account, doing a couple of posts and again finally sending in a story. (Not approved yet I'm afraid.)

I just submitted my first short yesterday, "Wife Christina". It's just over one Lit page long. There are considerable followups to it just dying to be edited and sent in as well. "Wife Christina" is his description of meeting Christina, falling in love and marrying her, then their wedding night where she loses her virginity.

I didn't have one of the volunteer editors look at it. Really, I just wanted to get it in and get it over with. I spent a lot of time editing it and having my wife read it too. In it's present state, she loves it. Of course she is biased.

I do have considerable technical writing experience.

Then I wrote the big thing too. 1.1 million words in just over two months with half of that in two weeks of almost no sleep, three pounds of coffee and literally days of not sleeping as I just couldn't type fast enough. Worrysome to me is it is not complete. Just a start and right now leaving the reader hanging. It also needs extensive editing although now I've gone over it twice and am letting it 'rest' a bit. While sex is included, it is not the main story line with several plots, more subplots.

I posted in AH (I think) and got a little help. not much.

Someone save me I'm addicted to this writing thing and how I got here I'm not sure. (Maybe fodder for an episode of "Intervention" )

Novels, Novellas and Short Stories all have one thing in common. The author feels something and conveys it in words that form a picture in his/her mind. Experience makes it better. Are there really hard and fast rules about style and method for these three?

Ok so you read one more "Virgin" post. Thanks.

MJL

 

[Iggy_Piggy]

Short Story = 1-15K-ish
Novella = 15-50K-ish
Novel = 50K-ish and up

The difference? Word count.

In general, I agree. If it's really a story and it's short, then it's a short story. If the author chooses to use too many words for one purpose and not enough for another, then it's probably a poorly-written short story, but it's still a short story.

 

[SimonBrooke]

Distinctions

There is a world of difference between a novel and a novel-length story. There is a world of difference between a short story and a truncated novel scene. No matter how enjoyable each of the four things might be to read or write.

Could you elaborate on the difference?

I thought I had on every post I made prior to that one.

I crave pardon; I am, notoriously, a bear of very little brain. But what I've seen you say, pertinent to the distinction, is:

I think the defining element of a short story is that it must be short enough to be comfortably read in one sitting... Short stories, like you said, are the perfect ground for concision, for straightforwardness, and for precision writing... There is a general obsession with constructing perfectly defined characters with background histories and detailed physical descriptions that has nothing to do with the mechanics of short story. Those are novel-writing vices...

and

Someone said that "a series of sex scenes is not a plot." And that may be true, if you're thinking of novels and novellas, romance or not, where sex scenes are the kind of sex scenes we're all used to reading, little interludes before you go on with the real story. You can usually cut them out and it wouldn't affect the plot or the way we see the characters at all. Put this together with what I had said before about the mechanics of short stories, and if these scenes can be cut out, then they absolutely must be cut out. Which means that in my opinion, you can't have an erotic / pornographic short story (as opposed to a novella or novel), unless the sex scenes are very much the plot and the character development - which is definitely not as easy or simplistic as it might sound, and quite different from having sex scenes without plot or character development.


Edited to add: I think CharleyH's The Screening, for example, illustrates this point perfectly.

My thanks for the pointer to The Screening, which is indeed a wonderful story.

However, what this boils down to is

(1) Short stories are, as Selena said, just stories which are shorter, and
(2) If you want a story to be short you keep it tight and cut out any elements which aren't critical.

But it seems to me that whatever one is writing - if the writing is craftsmanly - one keeps it tight and leaves out any elements that aren't critical, so that doesn't help my understanding. What features might I find in a novel length story that I would not find in a novel, or, alternatively, what features might I find in a novel that I wouldn't find in a novel length story?

The 'novel writing vices' you cite are not, it seems to me, the vices of good novellists, and it does not seem fair to compare good short pieces with poor longer ones.

 

[Verdad]

Hmmm, I felt a degree of discomfort about this discussion too, but more because it doesn't lend itself easily to useful conclusions than because I don't see the difference between short stories and novels or the point that Lauren is trying to make.

From the author's point of view, I can agree that the story will turn out as long as it needs to be. It is a part of author's instincts (and craft) to make the decisions about what to include and what not, where to spend more attention and where to spend less, where to start and where to finish, and indeed how to tell a story.

But from the critic's point of view, I'm recognizing that these decisions, premeditated or not, eventually result in a product that can be classified as a short story, novella, or a novel, or a product that has a feel of a discordant hybrid about it. The word count is of no help, here.

What makes the discussion difficult, I suspect, is that this resulting hybrid can be traced to a number of specific less than successful writing choices for which "writing short stories as if they were novels" is a summative name--a syndrome, if you will--rather than a violation of a particular rule itself.

Personally, I recognized this syndrome with ease, from erotic fiction particularly, and so for me the value of the thread is in bringing it to consciousness, but I'm unsure how else to describe it to someone with whom the observation didn't resonate (perhaps the thread-starters could) or how much further the discussion can be taken.

For instance, can we successfully break the problem down to its most common contributors, or is the problem too much case-dependent, too much of the I-know-it-when-I-see-it variety?

These less than successful writing choices that contribute to the problem, how many of them fall under the usual no-no's, and how many result from perfectly lovely prose in a perfectly wrong place? (E.g. an over-written scene vs. a well-written scene that would do well in a novel but not in a short story. Or, a character who's too large for his story.)

Is it even a matter of particular choices, which could be fixed in editing (extraneous details, minor structural changes), or more a matter of fatally flawed, meandering stories with nothing to relate?

How does this last reflect on erotic writing in particular--is it somehow more susceptible to this problem?

How does it affect writers with different creative approaches? (Some of us start from an abstract problem and put the meat on the bones, some from a concrete picture, digging for its meaning.)

And, something that Simon touched upon, with the impact of the internet, are we likely to keep noticing this problem (those of us who do) or are we likely to soften up and stop considering it as such? Would that be abandoning the criteria or opening up toward different reading experiences?

I'm not pretending I know the answers.

Verdad

 

[SimonBrooke]

I'm spending the day writing a story...

Which I shouldn't be, I have more important things to do, but...

As I write I'm thinking about this discussion.

The story I'm working on is one that has been sitting in a just-barely-sketched state for at least four years, and which a friend has recently given me the impetus to get moving with. It's a very odd story, and its certainly not going to end up being novel length (although it interweaves with other stories in the same project).

It's currently sitting at 3,900 words, and I think I'm probably half-way there, so with editing down after I've finished writing it will probably end up being about 6,000. So is it a short story? And, specific to this site, is it an erotic story?

I don't think it fits Lauren's definition of a short story. It certainly has a lot of character work; there's dialogue which is primarily there to establish character (although I think all of it supports the plot).

"Laura, I don't want you taking Fiona to your art college parties. She's got her A levels to do, and she's got to concentrate..."

"You mean you don't like our friends..."

"I don't want her to be distracted. Oh, and tell Heather not to bring David home. If she wants to sleep at his place..."

"Mum, David is so last week..."

"She's dumped him already?" Sheila made a face. "I'm not surprised. But... just don't bring boys home."

Laura looked at her mother, suddenly alert. "You don't want Trixie to get fucked, do you?"

"Laura! Don't use that language in front of me!"

"But you don't, do you?"

"She's too young."

"She's eighteen, Mum."

"I know, but she's a very young eighteen."

"Bollocks, Mum. Just because she's clever. You know, you'd do us all a favour if you would go out and get laid. It's three years since dad left, and you'll wear that vibrator out..."

"That's enough, Laura! I do not use a vibrator!"

"Why do you keep one in your bedside drawer, then?"

Sheila blushed angrily, and changed the subject. "Who's this Obi Wan? Is he David's replacement?"

It certainly does not fit the 'only one theme/only one incident' account of a short story. And I think of it very definitely as an erotic story. It's a story about a seduction, and it's a story about eroticism.

But most of the plot - and all of the sex - happens off stage. It's implied. There will be readers who simply won't get it, who will find it just too strange.

So... is this effort foredoomed to be a bad short story, because it has too much in it? Too many characters, too many relationships, too many incidents? Is it foredoomed to be a bad short story because key beats in the plot are purposely elided? Or is it, instead, a bad novel, because too short?

If I believed the normative prescriptions about what makes a good short story, what makes a good novel, I might as well stop writing now, because what I'm working on will clearly not fit. But I'm arrogant enough, or pig headed enough, or possibly just innocent enough not to believe those prescriptions. I will write the story I'm trying to tell, and it will be as long as it will be. And then we'll see how good it is.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

I think that the reason why this sort of threads imply a degree of discomfort is that every author feels the need to defend his or her own way of doing things and takes it personally if someone else even suggests there's a better one. For the record, I was not trying to suggest that. There are many excellent erotic tales posted at Literotica, of various lengths. I agree that a good tale will be as long as it needs to be, obviously.

That's not what the proposed discussion was supposed to be about, though. I merely pointed out the fact that erotic short stories, which is a very specific format that has more to it than word count, are rare. I said that they are rare because most amateur authors have no idea about how to write short stories, and if your intention is to write a short story, then you should be aware of the technique involved, or you'll most likely end up with either a story that is just short or, if you're lucky, with a novella. Again, there is nothing wrong with that. Unless, of course, your intention was to write a short story.

Actually, none of this is at all surprising. There's no tradition whatsoever for erotic (or maybe I should been saying pornographic) short story, and prior to magazines such as Playboy started publishing short stories, they were unheard of. The erotic/pornographic novella has always been and still is very much the norm.

***​

I'm pressed for time, so I'll have to come back a little bit later to respond to Simon's query about novels vs. novel-length writings, and to add my view on some of the questions raised by Verdad, but for now:

So... is this effort foredoomed to be a bad short story?

In my opinion, from the way you describe it, it is foredoomed to not be a pornographic short story. And that's fine, because you didn't set out to write one. It will end up being a short story, a novelette, a novella, a novel, or something else. Good or bad, regardless of which category it turns out to fall into, will depend on your writing.

 

[slyc_willie]

I think this is one of the reasons why there are so few actual short-stories at Lit (the other being the opposite, lots of people focusing exclusively on the sex, with plot becoming a minor nuisance if there at all). Many of the stories posted by good authors in here devote so much to plot and character, relegating sex to a very minor role in the story. I'm not saying that is bad per se, of course, but I don't know if you're writing short stories or something else - most likely a novella, as sunandshadow said, with a fully-developed story arc.

Someone said that "a series of sex scenes is not a plot." And that may be true, if you're thinking of novels and novellas, romance or not, where sex scenes are the kind of sex scenes we're all used to reading, little interludes before you go on with the real story. You can usually cut them out and it wouldn't affect the plot or the way we see the characters at all. Put this together with what I had said before about the mechanics of short stories, and if these scenes can be cut out, then they absolutely must be cut out. Which means that in my opinion, you can't have an erotic / pornographic short story (as opposed to a novella or novel), unless the sex scenes are very much the plot and the character development - which is definitely not as easy or simplistic as it might sound, and quite different from having sex scenes without plot or character development.


Edited to add: I think CharleyH's The Screening, for example, illustrates this point perfectly.

The Screening was quite good, I agree.

Your above comment was exactly what I had in mind when writing Pretty Baby. A few of the sex scenes were gratuitous, I'll admit, but overall, sex was a very important part of the story. It was Alyssa's profession, after all.

Since first posting on Literotica, I have generally moved away from 'stroke' stories that focus only on a particular sexual situation and on to larger pieces with more character and depth. Not that I'm saying I won't write stroke pieces in the future, but that is not what I am focused on at the moment.

I have always tried to find a reason for describing the sex in my stories, other than simply because I am posting on an erotic story website. If the sex isn't more than 'just sex,' if it doesn't say something about one or more of the people involved, it's simply gratuitous and unnecessary.

 

[lipsxsexy]

i love short stories about teacher students...just a thought for the day heheheehe :d

 

[elfin_odalisque]

Does size matter?

Found this interesting thread too late, probably, but I will my add two cents anyway.

Yes, size matters, and Selena’s numbers fit what publishers define for submissions. However, just because these terms are used as shorthand descriptions for story length doesn’t mean the basic definitions of the genres have changed.

Stories were always short – myths, legends, fables, parables even poems. The word itself comes from ‘history’. These were tales regarding morality and the past passed down through generations by word of mouth. By necessity they had to be simple.

Even today, the structure remains the same – a single plot, few characters, little conflict and a twist in the tail, an explosive message. Surely Homer’s Iliad is just a series of short stories?

The novel (new story) must surely derive its structure from the theatre – Greek tragedy. The three-act concept, the idea of struggling against opposing forces, the climax, then the resolution, is surely straight from Sophocles and Euripides and that lot. Don’t we talk of dramatic construction? And I was always taught at school that a novella was, by definition, satirical – like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron. I have never heard Turgenev’s great novel ‘First Love’ called a novella, even though only about 35,000 words. I don’t like using ‘novella’ to describe a short novel. Can’t we use ‘novelette’?

Yes, you can have classic erotic short stories. The Black Lace (Virgin Books) series ‘Wicked Words’ is a good example.

All this just to say I agree with Lauren, you can have short or novel length ‘tales’ that are neither short stories nor novels. In fact I thought Simon and neon made the same point but more obliquely.

On the site you rarely find short stories or novels; most posts are short or long ‘tales’, which is what most people seem to want. I find nothing wrong in that – rules are made to be broken. Also there is a third, very popular style, which you could call ‘episodic’, in that it follows a TV series format – same characters but a different scenario each chapter. Readers, like viewers, seem more comfortable keeping with characters they've already got to know.



Sorry, rant over, back to work.

 

[sellthecookie]

personally, the short story has that sense of sexy urgency in it, unlike the novel form which is more laidback and sprawling.

and considering that the net generation of today are short-attention spanned, a short story, or even a fast fiction, or haiku form seems enough.

 

[pcremington]

What is a Short Story

I enjoyed the reading this discussion. I always believed that the story should dictate it own length. When the story is told and edited it "becomes what it is". Out of curiosity I pulled out my favorite edition of William Sidney Porter and found that his shortest "short story" was approximately 2000 words. By contrast his longest was about 9000-9500 words. Fourteen were 5000 to 6000 thousand words, and seventeen were 3500 to 4500 words.

This doesn't prove much except to say that there is a great deal of latitude in what a short story can be, and if you are a great author like O.Henry it doesn't matter at all.

 

[Softouch911]

I've used classical lit definitions to write & recognize fiction for a "few" decades, so (for me):

A short story:
flat or stereotypical characters (1-3)
single theme which will be acceptable to the audience
single instance of rising action and climax

Novel:
one or more round characters, fully developed
challenging theme or themes
action which rises to climax in steps or stages w/exposition between each to allow for development of next climax

There are many exceptions to the above, but exceptions prove the "rule."

Good writing is concise (except for Faulkner, Melville, Austen, et. al.)

The novel referenced in my sig. began as an attempt at a short story. The last of twelve chapters is in draft now. Between each chapter is an "interchapter," or short story. I mention this so you can see that the question interests me for reasons beyond what I've posted on Lit.

Glad I found this conversation!

Respectfully,
(Prof.) Softouch

 

[WarLordwrites]

I vote Novels

Greetings

I write in "first person" and it seems I end up with a tale of adventure, Sci Fi, sword and sorcery no matter where I begin!

My tales are long form with involved plotting, usually several plot arcs and a largish cast list. Did I mention that hot women? Thought so...

I can admre the discipline of a well written short stoy only from a distance...

You have to write what works and is comfortable for you. Writing is a learn by doing skill...

Enjoy the journey

WarLord