Short Stories vs Novels - What's the Best Way to Learn/Practice Speculative Fiction?

It is said that writing short stories can be more difficult than writing full-length books. As a building block for me, a speculative fiction author in the genesis of his career, flash and short fiction are a priceless skill development tool. This especially applies to my fellow writers who have very limited time to write. This week’s post is about the difficulties that come with writing shorter work and why I think those challenges are making me a better writer.

What’s difficult about writing short fiction over novels?

While length is in your corner with flash and short fiction, you’re weaving a tale into a lot less real estate. This is where the difficulty lies. You have to make the reader care immediately, get to the point quickly, and, especially in the case of speculative fiction writers, establish an interesting world with few words.

Part of my desire to publish short fiction as opposed to writing a full novel first is that I fear wasting a lot of time only to learn I’m a garbage writer. I know, there are various drafts and good publishers and editors can get a rough story with a good concept into working order but I rather sharpen my skills through shorts. 

Also, I know my personality type pretty well and I get a massive dopamine hit when I complete a project. I’ll take multiple boosts over a year instead of waiting, for now. Eventually, I’ll get to that big book. 

Worldbuilding vs Storytelling - Addressing My Personal Flaws as a Writer

This will likely change as I get more experience, but I’m a chronic world-builder. My personality type (INFP / ENFP) thrives on idealism and creativity. When I get excited about a fresh idea, I am super focused on it. When I get into the work, however, and encounter bouts of mundane repetition, my interest wanes and focus goes out of the window. I’ve learned to overcome this flaw in my daily life, but it still hits hard in fiction writing. 

Whenever I think of a novel-length story, my brain immediately starts shaping all the story’s building blocks as opposed to figuring out what the story actually is. For instance, I’ve got the pages detailing the cross-universe journey of three space colony ships in a future with no faster-than-light (travel). Each one is a multi-generational ship headed to one of three ideal Earth-like planets. There’s more I may share here in the future, but I have all of these details and not a single story to tell within that world. I have no protagonist, antagonist, inciting incident, or third rail. 

With my short stories, the protagonist or third rail is typically the spark and I build around it. Once I get better at that, I’ll start pulling some ideas from little world’s I’ve started creating just to see if readers take to them. As a matter of fact, the short I’m working on now had no relation to any of my previous concepts but, in sharpening up the details, it gave me ideas on how to better flesh one particular concept out. When I use a longer work to return to the world this short establishes, it’ll be a cool thread for readers to tug if they do some digging.

These things are significant, but the most important is that I simply want to get full stories critiqued now so that my first novel’s first draft is stronger. It won’t be perfect but there are some things, like dialogue writing and character development, that I will sharpen while writing and submitting short stories to fiction magazines. Hopefully, for my future editor’s sake, I’ll turn in a concise first novel draft void of all the fluff and rookie mistakes I’d be sure to stuff into a draft today.