Tag Archives: writing novels

One of the questions I’ve been asked several times and never known how to answer before is “How is writing a novel different than writing a short story?” The smart-ass answer is, of course, a novel is longer, but it’s more than that, more a question of the complexity that a greater length affords you, an ability to move in four dimensions rather than just three.

A short story is smaller, flatter, closer to two-dimensional, while a novel has at least four and probably much more than that. Things interconnect in a short story, but in a novel those interconnections become even more important, indeed are kind of building block. In a novel, things reflect, are doubled, made more complicated, imbued with meaning. So what’s the difference? For me, it’s in the writing, in getting enough of the book in my head to be able to figure out where it’s going next.
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