A Quote by Lynn Abbey

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

Lynn Abbey

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Away Balance Because Commitment Different Dull Exquisite Frankly Get Get Away Made More Novel Novelists Reader Requires Sense Short Spot Story Story Writing Two Writing

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Lynn Abbey
American - Author
Born: September 18, 1948

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.

Jonathan Carroll

A novel requires a certain kind of world building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see. I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

Dan Chaon

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

Nell Freudenberger

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

Dan Chaon

With a novel, you have to have a story. It's much more important to have it matter to the reader what happens to people, and it has to make sense and end in a way that is satisfying. So I spend a lot more time thinking about that. Then the writing itself usually is easier for me, because I know where it's going.

Dave Barry

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

Neil Gaiman

I don't revise a lot when writing short stories. As far as the novel, I definitely thought more about plot. Honestly, I'm still pretty confused about what "plot" means. I've been reading some of my Goodreads reviews and one reader noted that the The Last Days of California "reads like a short story stretched to the breaking point, padded and brought into novel range..." I don't know what people want, really.

Mary J. Miller

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

Bruce Coville

It is very tough to make a short film. It's like writing a short story, which is tougher than writing a novel. You can't afford to faff around; you can't indulge. You have to get to the point.

Naseeruddin Shah

I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.

Hanya Yanagihara

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

Julian Barnes

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

Elizabeth Bowen

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

Margaret Mahy

I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.

Sarah Hall

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.

William Faulkner

Each kind of story has its own problems in writing, but my main concern really is to keep the reader on his toes, or to keep the strip unpredictable. I try to achieve some sort of balance between the two that keeps the reader wondering what's going to happen next and be surprised.

Bill Watterson

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