SciFi Wire interview
posted by Among Amid While at 8:45 pm
29 October, 2005
About Me
- Name: Among Amid While
- Location: Sydney, Australia
I write fiction. My latest novel is Zeroes, the first book of the Zeroes trilogy (YA fantasy), a collaboration with Scott Westerfeld and Deborah Biancotti. My novel Sea Hearts is published as The Brides of Rollrock Island in the UK and the US. I've also written Tender Morsels and five short story collections: White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes, Yellowcake and Cracklescape.
Previous Posts
- Orf to Melbourne
- If a short-short story is 250-1000 words...
- The reason I don't answer...
- Bog near Parnu
- Big news
- At Galaxy today, I bought...
- Kids' Night In 2 Out
- John Banville on writers
- The novel
- Word verification
5 Comments:
You're insane! Short stories are so much harder to write well than novels.
Nah, you can keep your eye on all the elements in a short story. A novel is so big they slide away from you and have to be tracked on spreadsheets and other nonsense. She says gloomily, about to dive into Little Peach again.
Nah, there's more room to mess about, to experiment in a novel. In a short story if even one word is in the wrong place it wrecks the whole story. Not so for a novel which can have a whole ending that sucks, e.g. Motherless Brooklyn and still be a really fine novel. The short story form is completely unforgiving, there's no slack. They're much much harder to get right.
What's more novels are way more fun to work on, cause unlike a short story there are always new bits and parts you forgot about to delight you. With a short story you're looking at the same small amount of words over and over and over again. Aaargggh!!!
Yes, but it's easier to see the word that's wrong in a short story, because the structure is so simple. I agree that it's unforgiving, but it also gives you such a small arena to sin in that you can't go really wrong for really long. And it's easier to rewrite the whole thing as an experiment - you can do it in a day or two, rather than a month or two.
Short stories are like contract work - you can keep a cheerful eye on where you might be working next week. Novels are like waged work, where you can't imagine it ever ending.
*puts head on desk and sheds tear or two*
Wow, you have SUCH a different take on it. For me short stories are the endless, hopeless struggle, not novels. You can rewrite them a hundred times and they can still suck. It's knowing which of the words aren't right that's the trick. No easy task.
With a novel you have a whole world, a whole universe to play in. You can make it how you will. I always feel so free when I'm working on a novel; so constricted and weighed down when working on a short story.
Novels are VERY forgiving. I doubt there's a novel out there that isn't flawed in some way, but it just doesn't matter. What's good about a novel is so complicated and rich that it doesn't matter if some bits of it don't quite work. That's never ever true of a short story. If one thing is broke then game over (I'm speaking here about reading, rather than writing them).
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