Short Story vs Novel

GREG HOLLINGSHEAD 'fAn,.... OC'...... ,r'O"',., convictionexists arrlonlg or later one moves on from the short rin.',......" ...."',..... himself as world's he meant. But with most move is more a market decision than an artistic one, because the demands and of the two forms are in so many different A short is far less like a novel it is like a and a poem is line breaks. and you Odd metncs, it up after she finished it's The between the word short writer dreams such a is a of stories with discursive and other connective tissue and the first how little room there is in a extraneousness, or noise. The difference oelVJ£:>en and the novel is not but more C0l1ce~DtlJal un... '""'... u."'fo"o that the narrative must carryon its not that causes the a is rather more and 1..,"',-,.':>'......u errlD()QleQ details of the text A scene in a short in the text to UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 4, FALL 1999 SHORT STORY VS NOVEL 879 every word of the text, every nuance of rhythm, every piece of shading and point of light, has been brought to bear upon it. As Frank O'Connor said, in a short story the crisis is the story. In a novel, by contrast, the crisis is only our destination, it occurs as a point in an unfolding of time; it is the logical result of what has come before it, which is as good as to say, of the moral qualities of the hero's choices to date, and it indicates what the future has in store for one who, by having acted this way, has come to this. So while the short story, like poetry, seeks to focus time, the novel, being more like history, being the most secular of forms, seeks to survey it. This is why when other than market forces are allowed to prevail, the novel is a form best suited to older writers. The minds of older writers have slowed down and stopped jumping around so uncontrollably, they have grown familiar if not necessarily easy with their own contents, their spiritual hunger has been dulled by time and its accommodations, and they are now interested more in the inexorable laws of moral implication than in perfect artistic moments of drunken poise. Also, of course, having more personal history to survey, they have more to work with. They have the material. Young writers are rarely able to maintain the perspective necessary to write good novels, but they do often write good short stories, and they do often write good strange hybrid longer fictions that poeticize the modes of the novel and novelize poetry. Unfortunately, by the time they're writing good novels, they are often no longer writing with the spiritual force ofpoets. Butevery once in a while, to the salvation of literary fiction, there appears a mature writer of short stories - someone like Chekhov, or Munro - whose handling of the form at its best is so undulled, so poised, so capacious, so intelligent, that the short in short story is once again revealed as the silly adjective it is, for suddenly here are simply stories, spiritual histories, narratives amazingly porous yet concentrated and undiffused, grave without weight, ordinary but strange, and the unhappy bifurcation of poetry and history is once again revealed as the pernicious cuItural illlision it is. ...