The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.
'Game Of Thrones' was too big a canvas for a movie, but 'Dirty White Boys' is like a great old Western: there's so much compression, and it's so pressurized, it demands to be told in one sitting.
A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.
I think a story should take as long to tell as it is appropriate to that particular story.
I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.
TV, particularly network television, gives you a much greater opportunity to tell a long-form story, to develop a character and keep it detailed. Film, by its nature, is more finite.
I thought ["Summer Sisters" ] would be a children's book - two girls who summer together from very different backgrounds. And then when it just kept going and going and going. They kept getting older.
If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.
If I'm really immersed in a story, I try to finish it in a few days. If it's a longer work, then it would take a few months.
I don't think because a story has humor in it means it's brief. For some reason, people think anything that's 30 minutes is a comedy, comedies can be longer or shorter, so can dramas.
The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.
A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.
My story is very long. And for somebody to write a good story, one needs a good writer, too.
When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough.
In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.
A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.
I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.
I had no idea how long books were supposed to be.
Print reporters have the opportunity to go so much more in depth in certain stories than television reporters do because they're working on stories for months at a time.
For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words.
I love telling stories. I love the intimacy between the writer and reader. When you write sketches it's over in two minutes. When you write a book the characters have to have a bit of emotional depth.
In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is
If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing - there may just be too much of it.
A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.
I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.
