If you’re a new writer, or even a more seasoned one, and you have a new idea for a story, you may wonder: is your story a short story or novel? Like most things in art, there are few hard and fast rules in writing. But below are some questions to ask yourself if you’re unsure whether your narrative is better suited to the form of a short story or novel.
How big is your cast of characters?
A good rule of thumb is the more characters your story has, the more likely you need a novel to give them the space for readers to get to know them.
Does your story have a subplot?
The short story has one plot. In a mystery short story, it could be who shot Old Man Thompson. There are no subplots. Because of the short form, everything in the short story has to work at solving the mystery. If you want to develop subplots, you’ll have to write a novel.
How complicated is your story?
This is related to the question above but not the same. In a short story, my clues for solving the mystery of who shot Old Man Thompson will have to be fewer and possibly more simple. I’ll have fewer suspects. If I wrote this story in a novel, I would have room to add more clues, more suspects, maybe additional crimes, like a murderous assault or a theft.
How much time does your story cover?
A story covering a year or years probably needs a novel. But not always. You could write a short story covering that much time, but you would have to write telling scenes selected from those years. For example, you wrote a story about a father and son’s reconciliation and you use Christmas celebrations to chart the repair of that relationship. In a novel, you would have time to show what happens between each Christmas. In a short story, you would have to confine yourself to just the scenes at Christmas.
Do you find yourself padding?
If you’re adding characters or scenes just to meet a word count, then you probably have a short story or novella on your hands. My favorite mystery series is Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout. A fan of the series once wrote that Mr. Stout was a master of the novella but some of his novels weren’t quite as good. He often put in padding. Some of it is very entertaining and very funny padding. For example, in the novel Some Buried Caesar, Archie Goodwin, assistant to the great detective Nero Wolfe, is arrested and has to spend time in a jail. He and another prisoner decide to start a prisoners’ union in order to improve conditions. It’s fun but doesn’t have anything to do with the plot.
The most important thing to remember when deciding whether your idea is a better fit for a short story or novel is …
Which form best serves the story?
If you write fiction, you have to make story king. That means if a metaphor you love doesn’t serve the story, you cut it out. If your favorite quirky character is killing the pace, you remove him. If you find yourself inventing boring dialogue to fill a word count, you eliminate it.
One technique I’ve found helpful is to write a one to three sentence summary of what the story is about. For my first novel, A Shadow on the Snow, the summary is “Nineteen-year-old Rae Riley needs to discover who is sending her increasingly threatening anonymous notes.” As I wrote a section or edited one, I had to ask myself if it served the basic premise of the story. If it didn’t, I either needed to cut it or adapt it.
Have you read a short story that might have been better as a novel? Or a novel that should have been a short story?
