Short Story v. Novel

If you were to tell someone about one moment of your life, and only one, that moment would be the short story. A short story is a glimpse into the life of a character. This glimpse is definitive. The events of a short story compel a character through the rest of his or her life. Everything that happens before a short story is a preamble. Everything after a short story is a consequence. After all, Alan Cheuse often quotes his good friend Bernard Malamud as saying "a short story predicates a life."

Novels on the other hand are allowed the space to create entire worlds for readers. Prolonged depictions of life and place set the goal of the novel as something different than that of the short story. Rather than suggest a life that happened outside the confines of a narrative, the novel aims to show the reader life.

John Gardner writes in On Becoming a Novelist about the experience of reading a novel.

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page... We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.

Here Gardner demonstrates how novels can be engrossing. Readers can become absorbed in a world different than their own. One can roam around the life of a character and experience a different life. The experience can be so exhaustive that upon closing a book a reader examines his or her own world in a different light, almost unsure of which reality is more compelling.

Is one better than the other? They seem to aspire to different goals. Sometimes you need the precision of a Kawabata story, and the suggestion that one moment can predicate an entire life. The brevity of a page can have a simplistic beauty to it. The novel on the other hand can be an exhaustive exploration of time and place. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude explores several generations of a family who inhabit a city from its rise to its fall. In this journey, we see not just the definitive moment of one character but those of a family and a place that are engrossing. Both narrative experiences are satisfying. One offers brevity and the other thoroughness.

My question to you is which do you prefer?

What is a Fiction Writer?

As a writer of both short stories and unfinished novels, I wonder what it is that defines me as someone who creates fiction. Of course, there is the obvious answer that I make up a story. Where a nonfiction writer bases narrative on events that actually happen, fiction writers take liberties. The characters, the events, even the setting can be drawn from the imagination.

In this process fiction is created. I would like to think that fiction is an imitation of life molded from the experiences in our lives in a mimetic fashion, but I feel there may be more to the craft than that. Consider the following quote from How Fiction Works by James Wood.

When Robert Browning describes the sound of a bird singing its song twice over, in order to "recapture / The first fine careless rapture," he is being a poet, trying to find the best poetic image; but when Chekhov, in his story "Peasants," says that a bird's cry sounded as if a cow had been locked up in a shed all night, he is being a fiction writer: he is thinking like one of his peasants.

Wood implies that it's necessary to inhabit the mind of the characters you create. For a fiction writer, it is not enough to document and comment on the world around you. You must live it. You must think through how a peasant, an expatriate, or a jazz musician would see and describe the world. In this sense, you acquire the diction and perspective of another and create a world that is not true. Some part of the fictive world has to resonate though. There must be something recognizable in fiction with which readers can relate. It is this aspect of recognition that draws readers to experience the life of another, whether the life actually occurred or not.

I think it is this ability to capture the mindset of characters that sets the fiction writer apart from the poet and nonfiction writer. If poetry is considered the purest, most condensed form of language, I would argue that fiction should be the considered the superlative telling of life, not of the author's life, or of those the author witnessed, but of those lives the author is capable of imagining.