I went to dinner with some other writers during the World Fantasy Convention over the weekend (nothing fancy, we walked next door for some pizza), we were talking about writing (surprise!), and I hit them with my standard rhetorical question: “Writing is hard, and we’re never satisfied, so why do we do it?” To which they dutifully answered, “Because we can’t not do it.”
Writing is hard, and it doesn’t pay well. The only way to make it pay well is to write novels (or screenplays, yikes!). There has long been a debate in the field, though, about how you come to write novels. Should you try to make a name for yourself with short stories first, or is that no help and you might as well simply start drafting a three-volume space opera?* It occurs to me that I have an answer. It may not be your answer, but it works for me.
I recommend starting with short stories–not because you will necessarily make a name for yourself that will launch your novel career (although it certainly might; win the Short Story Hugo and wait for the offers to come in), but because short stories are, word for word, harder to write than novels, and I believe that if you can do the hard work, the easier stuff is…easier.
In the seminal work, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott advises you to focus your writing on the smallest detail possible, then work outward. In Zen and the Art of Archery (a fine book I cannot locate now on my newly-reorganized bookshelves), Eugen Herrigel spends years simply learning to draw his bow. If I were a writing teacher, I would ideally spend all my time teaching my students to write a sentence. “If you can write a sentence,” I would say, “you can write a paragraph. If you can write a paragraph, you can write a page, and if you can write a page, you can write a story.”
Or a chapter. Each chapter of a book is in some sense a story. But compared to short stories, novels are lazy. Yes, they take more effort in the absolute sense, but in a short story, you have to pack everything into a small space (usually less than 5000 words). In a novel, you can wander for days and still find your way back. I needn’t give any examples; we all know some.
So I would start with the form that requires the greatest discipline. It has the added advantage that you can write a half-dozen to a dozen short stories in the time it takes to write a novel. A dozen 5000-word stories would give you a pretty short novel, but it would also be six times as varied an exercise.
There are, of course, people who jump straight into novels and succeed that way. I can’t say that they don’t write as well as those who start out with shorter work, but I also can’t say that they didn’t spend the previous ten years writing short stories that never saw print. It’s possible. There are as many ways to become a writer as there are…
No, actually, that’s wrong. There’s only one way to become a writer.
You start by writing a sentence. Because you can’t do anything else.
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*Whether you submit the first volume on its own while writing the second, or wait until all three are done, is a question in and of itself.
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