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 LONG AFFAIR VS STOLEN WEEKEND

When I'm asked how to write a book, I ask about the longest and shortest stories they've ever read. With that in mind, what kind of story is inside them to write? Are they full of a sweeping epic or something shorter? Shorter isn't less impressive, it's simply a different animal. I read Sue Grafton, the prolific alphabet detective story writer, describe an exercise she undertook to write a complete murder mystery in just a few pages. She likened it to painting a grain of rice with a 1-hair brush. I then read that exercise and it's marvelous! 

Long or short, you are going to use your imagination fully...just differently. If you're Tolstoy writing Anna Karenina you're reveling in the smell of wheat fields and the swish of the scythe, the drowsiness of the golden Russian sun and the weariness in Vronsky's bones after laboring with his workers. Then you're writing pages and pages to transport your reader to the countryside in 1874. If you're Grafton, you're puzzling how to describe the visible blood and the condition of the apartment in one sentence.

Both stay with the reader. I experienced that field just as I experienced that crime scene. 

Stephen King is brilliant at both long and short stories. I believe it was him I heard liken reading a writer's words to a relationship with them. A long story is a longer affair while short stories are like a kiss. Frequently new writers balk at short stories as not "serious" and that they want to write "a book"! That's fair. However, longer doesn't mean longer for sake of pages. The content needs to move the story, the words need to belong on the page.

So, what do you have in you? A long affair? Or a brief kiss?



-- Anna Erikssön Bendewald  




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