On the Difference of Short Stories

i.m. Alice Munro

I have thought of amusing-ish analogies, plenty of them, to make the distinction – when I’m asked The Question.

If the novel is a cake, the short story is a biscuit, and the poem is a sweet.

If the novel’s a marriage, the short story’s an affair, and I leave to your imagination what a poem is.

If the novel’s an orchestra, short story’s a string quartet, poem’s solo.

Novel = tour guide; short story = acrobat; poem = poltergeist.

What is the difference between...?

The analogy that came closest was, embarrassingly, hearts. Hearts may not be different in kind, as are cakes and biscuits and sweets, but they vary vastly in size and rhythm. When an idea comes to me, it brings with it a sense of rhythm even when it gives no sense of scale. An idea is a big or tiny heart around which I have to build-a-beast. Wait long and listen hard. Fluttery-fast, it’s a sparrow-verse; regularly rapid, it’s the hare of a story; ten seconds between booms, it’s Leviathan about to dive.

But recently I’ve come to a new and I hope better way of differentiating, and the difference no longer begins at the writing end.

Here it comes; see if it convinces —

Short stories are different from novels in this way: short stories have better readers.

Or, further from snappiness but closer to accuracy (at this stage), they expect their readers to be better — live in the possibility of it — and are written always in the glowing-growing space of that hope.

(Poems have for the moment gone off in a flap — your eye can follow their line-of-flight; but they haven’t ceased to matter, and you can expect them make a fairly devastating return.)

Shouldn’t, then, this distinction be detectible in every line of a good novel and a good short story?

Yes, and I believe it is.

The sentences in short stories might look, cursorily, verbs, nouns, commas, full stops, the same as those in novels, but they are spaced more widely apart. Their readers expect to traverse Alaskas of implication, in between sense units.

In the completeness of each form, there is a big difference, too. Short story readers expect to make the meaning of the story themselves, never to have it laid out for them. If a story ends with self-explanation, and some do, you can be sure it’s a misdirection. Go back, it will imply, re-read me again, against myself. I can’t be that obvious, otherwise I’d have been created by a novelist for a novelist’s exhausted or lazy or insecure readers.

The reason novels are written as joined-uply as they are is that they help exhausted or lazy or insecure readers along. Forgotten who that character is? I’ll redescribe a bit of them, or refer back to the quirk I tagged them with in Chapter Two.

Worried about what happened between the Wednesday evening and the Sunday morning? I’ll put in a little filler, just to reassure you the characters didn’t cease to exist and have purpose.

Short story readers never require remedial paragraphs. Each word is beyond the foregoing.

Many novel readers, on their commute or in bed before lights-out, don’t want the faff of re-starting their brains every dozen pages.

I sympathize; it’s far easier to have the same dramatis personae in mind, and a plot that re-energizes itself every dozen pages.

Easier, but not better.

(One thing we rarely consider, when discussing novels and short stories, is how they exist most of the time – which is not as they are while being read but as they are when partially remembered. Perhaps this isn’t your experience, but my memories of War and Peace don’t bulk any more vastly than my memories of ‘Lady With a Little Dog’. As many details of the latter have stayed with me, and its atmosphere of exultant melancholy is a value, a mind-presence, as weighty as Tolstoy’s panoptic hurly-burly.)

Over the years, we short story writers have trained our readers to expect more of us, so we can expect more of them.

These readers should be celebrated, and praised, and rewarded with work that aspires to their excellence.

And here come the poems, like eagles, to rip our presumptuous guts to bits. Because the writers of poems will already have seen this argument through to its end. The experienced reader of John Donne or Paul Celan is, when compared to the average short story reader, supernatural in their adeptness. They can jump between universes.

If novel = tour guide, short story = acrobat, poem = poltergeist.

The question, now, with these brilliant readers of ours, awaiting - How to get to them?

Right now, we have a bewildering diversification of means. There are webzines, blogs, podcasts, online communities, open mic readings — all of these coming into existence alongside conventional print magazines, anthologies and single-author collections.

Sometimes money is exchanged for a story, though the economy is bizarre. Short story competitions exist for which the winning prize is many times what an average novelist will earn from a novel. But, around these, are dozens more whose gathered entry fees help finance literary organisations, magazines, university departments.

Articles are written about Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize capping the Year of the Short Story.

It’s all looking good, isn’t it?

In ten years’ time, we may think this age golden.

But sales figures.

Most editors at major publishing houses will say (watch their eyes) they love short stories, they wish (watch their blinking eyes) they could publish more of them, it’s just...

The truth is, many of these maligned editors have been publishing them, in disguise. There’s an un-named form around, between the short story and the novel – and, no, ‘shovel’ won’t do for it. I have written a couple of them. It’s a collection of loosely interlinked short stories. It’s a form that is right for our virtualizing society. And I would argue that many of the defining books of the last 20 years have taken this form: Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad — I would claim all of these as books of interlinked short stories disguised as novels.

But sales figures.

No, none of these were mega-sellers.

(Give them time.)

Why aren’t short stories more popular?

The question was answered earlier, I hope. Because although readers are getting better and better, there aren’t that many exquisite ones out there. (Poets nod.) Because you can only sell short stories to short story readers. You can’t simply expect a novel reader to turn magically into a short story reader. They’re out of shape, dammit. They’re knackered. We need to train them. We need to improve their diet. We need to show them that, in this miraculous form, they will have to make double the effort – but, as a reward, they will become more than half the author.

A version of this first appeared in Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ and Artists’ Companion, 2014.

Image credit: Derek Shapton

Alice Munro