Forum / Long short fiction versus short short fiction

Kevin Myrick
Jan 26, 03:05pm

Fellow Fictionauts,

My question for the week is this: what are your feelings as readers about long short stories (I'm thinking more than 1,200 words) versus flash and shorter pieces.

I myself enjoy longer stories where a character is more fleshed out, but I've also enjoyed several stories on here of a shorter or flash nature.

Would you all care to share your thoughts and experience with this? And also, while on the subject, what do you think works better for Fictionaut?

-Kevin

Gina Perales
Jan 27, 10:58am

I like reading flash online and short fiction from a book, I suppose. Either works well here, though. Flash is faster, so when you're supposed to be working and the boss is away, I can get away with perusing stories on the internet!

Longer short stories is what I'm trying to read on the weekends or after the kids go to bed. Sometimes, though I wonder, why authors took so long to prove the point they are trying to make or trying to make the reader think about.

sara t.
Jan 27, 11:34am

IMO, i like the shorter stories better for similar reasons to Gina!. I peruse fictionaut at work and cant be bothered with very long pieces. But also, I find reading online not as comfy as reading in bed, so i would tend to skip over long stories unless they hook me and keep me hooked all the way thru.

Susan Gibb
Jan 27, 01:34pm

Agreed, while I do appreciate the longer short story of over 2k, I rarely can read them online, particularly here where so many great stories are being offered in such quantity daily.

So for now, online it's short-short; book form, I'll read the longer pieces.

Kevin Myrick
Feb 02, 08:12am

Gina, Sara and Susan,

Thanks for your comments. What would you say then is the target length for you reading a story in 5-10 minutes? Under 1,000 words? Under 750?

-Kevin

Finnegan Flawnt
Feb 02, 12:20pm

i agree with sara and susan during my teaching term (two more weeks!) - right now, there are two pieces (by meg pokrass and by carol reid) that i've wanted to read since a few days but i haven't been able to give them the attention i'd like to. (i say that speaks for the quality of these stories: a sequence of flash paragraphs does not amount to a short story)

as for your 2nd question, kevin, for my daily intake of 1-2 stories at fnaut, 750 words is about the max.

odd, makes me feel like a fishmonger. 'how much of the salmon? - anything else?'

Susan Gibb
Feb 03, 12:15pm

Uh-oh. I'm a slow reader because I tend to close-read seeking out metaphors and meanings and themes, and can't help proofreading too even as I'm trying to get the main drift of story.

That said, I do try to read each entry here on a daily basis, but when pressured, will pass at the over 1500 word mark.

Finnegan Flawnt
Feb 03, 12:35pm

susan, you're too easy to pressure if one triggers your inner editor...so many great comments from you on fnaut to prove your terrible weakness.

Carol Reid
Feb 03, 12:44pm

Yay for inner and outer editors :) I post the dreaded longer works so I do make an effort to read and comment on the over 1500s. BTW I am thankful for the "intent to read"...I know it can be a chore to read many words on the screen and that time is limited.

Finnegan Flawnt
Feb 03, 05:49pm

good on ya, carol. as i said (elsewhere) i'd feel poorer if you had not exposed these pieces and i had not (finally) gone to read them. also, i find that i keep coming back to these longer pieces while i rarely go back to shorter ones (poems excepted).

Kevin Myrick
Feb 03, 06:27pm

So yesterday was my first attempt at writing a much shorter story than what I'm used to (I tend to average somewhere in the 1600-2000 word range at the moment) Gauging from immediate reaction, it got a few dozen views but not much more than that. I'm a little disappointed by the outcome, but so it goes as Vonnegut wrote.

I plan to continue to experiment with the form regardless of page views. Its worth the experience of learning to write short and long in my opinion.

However, if anyone has tips they'd like to suggest on forcing one to write shorter fiction than I normally do, I'd appreciate the commentary.

Susan Gibb
Feb 03, 09:45pm

Yeah, I was a fifteen hundred worder myself; what changed me was (honest!) reading all the short stories here and finding what gave them their impact. Minimal but sharp description, concise setting, dialogue that tells character, background, and scenario all at once.

David Ackley
Feb 05, 08:43am

There's a good book on the short story, THE LONELY VOICE by the great Irish practicioner of the form, Frank O'Connor. He says that in short stories the subject determines the length. Maybe, if that's right, it's a mistake to predetermine a length when you're writing something. Just keep writing until you come to the end, 500 or 20,00 words later, then you know how long it was supposed to be.

Kevin Myrick
Feb 05, 11:26am

That is a good point David. I normally subscribe to that rule of thumb for fiction, but I also find that limiting myself to a certain number of handwritten pages or words helps too. Kind of gives me a guide of where I want to go with something too.

David Ackley
Feb 05, 12:01pm

For sure, Kevin. I don't mean to deny the advantages of limits and thinking in advance about form, just advocating for a certain elasticity on one's part as the content begins to assert its own imperatives.

Kevin Myrick
Feb 05, 12:09pm

My new exercise David (and for anyone else who is interested) is trying to write a story on one legal page. Should be interesting to see the various results.

David Ackley
Feb 05, 12:42pm

I don't know if I could go any lower than "In the Woods" which I put up here a little while ago, but I'll be real interested in seeing what you come up with.

Susan Tepper
Feb 05, 03:52pm

I like both forms, but will stop reading a longer story if it doesn't grab me in the first paragraph or two--
I think it's from reading too many stories as an ed-- you get a feel for what's going to work pretty early in a piece.
what I find interesting about a lot of submissions, is that many stories really "start" in the second or third paragraph. the first para feels almost like a "warm up", and I think if the writers had gone back over and done more revision, they would have seen that for themselves. on my own fiction, I delete a lot of what I write before the story gets to the completed stage.

David Ackley
Feb 06, 08:54am

There's a great piece of advice somewhere in Chekhov's letters where he tells a young writer:Go back to your story and tear up the first half.The story starts there.
That and your thoughts ring true. But I still have great trouble with beginnings because there's so much that wants to be there.

Susan Tepper
Feb 06, 10:06am

I know what you mean about beginnings. But sometimes that material belongs later in the piece, and so you can just move it. Or sometimes it's just stuff the writer has to get out and onto the page before the actual core story can begin. I treasure my delete button. I also try and remove as many adjectives and adverbs as possible. I think we all tend to over use them and they can glop up a story

David Ackley
Feb 06, 02:55pm

Yes, moving it is a wonderful option, and the delete button a treasured tool. I think sometimes the other problem is less with the adjectives and adverbs than that they're used as shaky props for imprecise nouns and verbs. Get those right and the need may never arise.

Kevin Myrick
Feb 06, 05:00pm

Unlike you guys, I hate the delete button. In fact, I can't say how many times I've rewritten a story on paper to avoid even having to use the thing. I shudder at the thought of the poor trees that have died in my quest for perfection on the noble yellow legal pad.

Jon Davies
Feb 18, 08:59pm

I know what you mean about long vs. short. It's hard to commit to longer pieces online (I read them anyway, though usually less often on Fictionaut and more often at Web journals). I'd for a long time been a writer in the 5000-word range. Then my stories got into 10k. I had to make a conscious decision to move stories to fewer than 2500 words, so people might actually read or publish them. Hence, I set a goal of writing first drafts in one sitting (24 stories in all). Then even 2500 seemed too long for many online, so I did the same with 500 (another 12). But really, my best stuff, I think, is still closer to 5k. Five hundred words is great for a flash of insight, but the longer work lets characters breathe and do things you simply can't do in a short piece. Some writers are great at the short shorts--I'm amazed at many of the writers on here. But I'd say my favorite stories are generally much longer--they just tend to have more power in the end. That space to breathe and develop a piece is one thing we're losing to the Web unfortunately.

Kevin Myrick
Feb 18, 10:46pm

Jon I know exactly what you mean. I feel like here on Fictionaut and on my website the shorter pieces have done much better than I expected, and I'm only a few weeks into this experiment of mine.

"I feel like to really let the character breathe," as you put so well, I need to write longer stories. On the one hand is what I love doing. But on the the other hand the reader must come first. And an audience is a fickle creature of shifting tastes and trends.

I plan to stick with my shorter stories for the moment, but the itch to write something longer is getting harder not to scratch.

And alas, you are right. Attention spans on the web are getting so much shorter. I know this is a problem when I can't get my dad to read stories I'd really like him to because he "only has a few minutes to read stuff on the website." I blame Facebook, Twitter and Text Messaging for this. People now get their entertainment and information in 140 characters. And unfortunately I can't write anything good in 140 characters.

I wonder how the writing market will begin to change now the Kindle is becoming more commonplace and the iPad is not too far from being release.

I think it will be interesting to see how authors will begin to self-publish and market on these devices as they continue to mature. I know I'm going to give it a shot.

Another random but final interesting thought is if the publishing market will push emerging talent on to these devices instead of putting out hard cover and then paperback editions.

Jon Davies
Feb 18, 11:25pm

The issue with e-books is pricing. I wouldn't buy a reader at the price it is ($300), and I wouldn't buy books for it at the prices that are being charged (for me, an e-book shouldn't cost more than $3.50, since it's not "real"). (If readers were cheap, I might buy one just to read public domain stuff, so I wouldn't have to go to the library and could read it away from the computer.)

But publishers aren't likely to be able to sell cheap books in e-format; there's just too much overhead--office space, production costs, network infrastructure, marketing. (E-book prices at Amazon have been an artificially low $9.95 because Amazon sells them at a loss, much to the chagrin of publishers who say the pricing is unsustainable and bad in terms of getting people used to such pricing.)

Self-publishing--sans so much overhead--will likely be easier, but one issue there will be the same as is the case today: marketing. Who's going to read the self-published book? The publishers are better at promotion than most people are as individuals (and the publishers lend a level of quality assurance and taste--I know if I pick up a Vintage book that there's a good chance it's going to be worth my time; not so sure of that if Joey Smith is publishing it himself and has only himself to recommend it); that said, I think those rare folks who can both self-promote well and write will be in good stead in the e-book revolution. Those folks are rare; if they weren't, we'd see more Lulu self-published print-on-demand books showing up as best sellers right now.

The longer form, however, may see a resurgence--you're right--once e-book readers are more common.

The shorter form has taken hold on the Web in part simply because there's just so much competing for your attention. (How many stories go up here on Fictionaut each day alone? Then add in news and commentary feeds from NYT or Slate, status updates and tweets from friends on social network sites, e-mail, and interesting blogs.) It's quite a commitment to read a 2000-word story, let alone a 5000-word one. Printing out a story makes those distractions go away but uses paper and ink; I find even downloading a story and pasting it into a Word document and reading it on the computer but offline--where all those blogs and Tweets and other stories can't grab me--can sometimes help (in part because I'm so used to reading and editing manuscripts that way). If I had a reader, though, I could get away from the computer altogether and just enjoy that story I downloaded in my armchair without even bothering to print it.

One does, on some level, have to go where the readers are. It's the reason I moved toward writing shorter things. But I've done my share of those and have recently been moving back to longer stuff for a break. As I noted, I just don't feel like most of my shorter stuff is as good as some of the longer stuff (which also takes more work, though).

Some folks are true masters of flash, though, and I am in awe of their ability because I just don't seem to be able to work that so well. I really need at least 1500 words to tell a story; shorter than that, it's often just nice words on a page--like a poem--and my feelings about that are I might as well write a poem. (But I have gotten better with practice. I like some of the 500-word pieces I wrote in the past year more than those written a couple of years ago.)

I have yet to see a Tweeted story that was actually a story in my book. I guess I'm old fashioned. 140 characters doesn't give space for rising action, climax, and resolution. Some good sentences at that length but nothing more. I tend to want more than a sentence. So I think there are limits for some readers in terms of just how short a writer can go.
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