This past Wednesday (October 26th), Shenandoah played host to Rebecca Makkai, W&L Class of 1999, as she read selections from her new novel, The Borrower. Video of her reading is available here and also here
During the Q&A immediately after the reading (which, sadly, didn’t make the video), Rebecca raised an interesting issue about writing. She highlighted the differences between writing a novel and writing a short story, and the difficulty that an author of one might have in writing the other. It’s a matter of space, really. A novel author is used to having a few hundred or so pages at his or her disposal in which to develop characters, plot, plot twists, etc. A short fiction author is used to having at most a couple dozen pages in which to develop the same things.
At this point, you’re probably wondering, okay, so what? Novels are novels and short fiction is short fiction. Never the twain shall meet. The problem arises in that writers are creative folk. They don’t like to be bound down to one genre- that’s boring. This creativity runs the danger of producing some bastardized version of the genres. A novel author is used to having oodles of space, as I’ve said before. When you normally think in terms of lengthily-produced plots, a space constraint like the one placed on short fiction is lethal. There simply is no room for the half-dozen plot twists that would’ve enticed a novel reader into continuing to read. To make a holiday-appropriate example, take Jane Eyre. Would you as a reader keep going with Jane if her story could only be 15 pages? Probably not, as all the details would be lost. Everything in the novel takes pages and pages- Jane’s childhood, the strange noises and occurrences, the wedding scenes, Jane’s wandering across the moors, etc. It would be nigh on impossible to condense or select that type of story into a short story; there’s just too much to deal with. Even if you were to take a single section of the novel as stand alone, would it work? With a lot of novels, no. To use Jane Eyre again, let’s take Jane and Rochester’s reunion. There’s not enough character depth or comprehensible back story in that section to carry the reader’s interest through. Read as a stand-alone “short story,” it’s too confusing, like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. Instead of “ooh, hurray for happy endings!”, the impression left behind is more akin to “who the hell are these people and why were they separated?”
Conversely, the short story author has trouble filling the pages necessary for a novel. While you may want to follow a character through that one particular moment of life in short story, it probably isn’t enough to hold your interest through a couple hundred pages. Faulkner’s Barn Burning works because it’s short; having to read through ten times the amount of microphiliac detail and desperate action would be unappealing. It’s like that paper you’re trying to stretch at 2 a.m.; it needs to be seven pages, but you’ve only got five. The filler you add looks like just what it is: inane filler. Likewise, a short story author can create a novel that looks like a number of short stories smushed together. The sections will hopefully be interrelated, but they still could easily stand apart from the other chapters.