Writer Olivia Ryan has been asking which her blog readers started writing first, short stories or novels, and the answers are interesting. I'm probably in what I'd guess is a largish minority, in that I started with novels, and until the second year of my Masters, ten years later, when I'd basically finished the novel that wasn't yet The Mathematics of Love, I didn't think of writing a story. But there was a workshop full of terrific writer-readers, and it was joy to discover that there was something I could write which took maybe a week or two, which I could spread out on the floor and contemplate whole, which friends would read and talk about, which magazines might publish, which someone might like enough to call Highly Commended, or even give a prize. Why not do that? For someone like me, who is not good at delayed gratification and who'd normally spend two years writing a novel which will only be read or real if a commercial enterprise thinks that it'll make money, it was a revelation. I had some success, too, chiefly at Bridport.
And yet, and yet... to this day, if a story of mine isn't working, it's usually because there's a novel inside it struggling to get out. And even now, too, if I'm suffering from a bout of feeling that it's all been done before, as I was talking about in Making the Skeleton Dance, I'm more likely to do that over a short-story plot, because it seems there's so little space in which to clothe the skeleton in more than a bikini, and get it to dance without dislocating its elbows. This is, of course, my deficiency, not the deficiency of the form: although sometimes an idea (for example the central idea of Maura's Arm) just is clearly a single-sitting story, fundamentally my story-telling mind works at novel-scale, and I'm not sure there's a lot I can do about it.
So I suppose it's hardly surprising that I do tend to jump into any talk which assumes that you can't write a novel until you've learnt to write short fiction, and if I hear of a card-carrying writing teacher saying that you mustn't try to write a novel till you have (and believe me, I have heard of such) then I begin to boil. Of course the skills are allied, most closely in the question of prose/style/close-writing, or whatever you want to call it. And it's often those skills which writing classes for beginners concentrate on. But it's not just a matter of a novel being longer: that greater length demands engineering which isn't just bigger, but is actually different. An elephant's legs are, proportionately, much thicker than a mouse's, mammals though they both are, and the same is true of fiction. A novel needs a single through-line - a hook, if you like - just as a short story does, but as well as that strand it needs multiplicity (in the accurate sense of the word: 'many-folded') of other strands: plots which keep providing climaxes, characters which sustain change over time, incidents which echo each other, ideas which develop and reflect and echo again. If Poe defined the form he invented as a story which could be read at a single sitting, the novelist's challenge is to write a story which will make sure the reader goes on wanting to sit back down.
So far, so bloomin' obvious, you might say. But although sentence-level decisions, about what a character does or says for example, can reveal a much larger - perhaps novel-sized - knowledge about who that character is, the reverse is also true. Macro decisions about a novel must be carried out at the micro level. What the narrator says about the season will be different, depending on whether the story covers a day or three different Julys. How a character parks the car outside their ex-wife's new house will not be the same if it's the central, emblematic episode of a piece of flash fiction, from if it's one of a series of such scenes, from first infidelity to custody of the cat.
Of course writing short fiction is as good a means as any of learning to get out of your own way, in the manner I was talking about in Ugly ducklings and wonky ducks. But what it won't do is teach you to write a novel, neither at the sentence scale, nor at the whole-book scale. Only writing a novel will do that.
