How To Tell The Length of A Story (or, Why Can't I Finish This Idea?)

I've been ruminating a lot about the difference between a novel and a short story. Obviously word length is the literal distinction, but a bud was recently asking how you can tell when an idea is going to be short or long. And I've been thinking about it more as I juggle writing a multi book series alongside much shorter projects.

Don't even get me started on novellas, those are everything else, man, I don't know. I've never intended to write a novella, those just kind of happen to me. Sorry, novellas, I'm not your spokesman.

The way I see it, short stories are a vehicle to indulge one concept and so the narrative can effectively be shaped around that one concept for maximum saturation. Novels are built on a foundation of core concepts, and therefore have less flexibility, since every single piece has two purposes. With a novel, I'm having to constantly juggle the “present” moment with the rest of the book, both past and future. I have to be more careful about the tracks I'm setting down since there's more riding on them. A short story is typically only focused on the present, or it’s such a short loop or time, there’s fewer gears to turn simultaneously.

I think short stories can be written more impulsively, and edited to make those impulses into something sharp and pointed. I tend not to plan anything when I'm writing short pieces, and I let the questions emerge as I write them. I want this conversation to be nerve-wracking, so I'll write it the way I want it to read and figure out why this guy is so nervous later. I can do a lot more retrofitting with much less at stake because everything takes less time.

There’s way less room for “fuck it” scenes in a novel since that can risk derailing everything I’ve done up to that point—that’s when I end up writing myself into a corner. I have to know what these characters want, who they are fundamentally, then commit to following their arcs to completion. For me, I know something is short because it's founded on a single concept: horny haunted house, rather than a string of concepts tied together: beauty and the beast but they're both victims of abuse.

One of those ideas demands growth to see it through to its conclusion (a relationship that will be tested). One of those is chasing a single high point (noncon in a haunted house). One of those ideas came to me with strong characters (rich boy beauty and tired human beast). One of those came to me as a setting (kitschy haunted house attraction).

(Meanwhile, NIGHT PRINCE is an endless idea, one I crafted intentionally so I could pick it up and put it down whenever I wanted. There are no world shattering stakes, no single kink I'm attempting to chase, no ticking clock above their heads. There's an overarching mystery, and I'm simply zooming in and out of the story at my leisure. I have a list of ideas for that world, but none of them are integral. It's basically slice of life, just for kinky demons.)

The real secret to novel writing is that a novel is allowed to be a series of short stories strung together. So if you have an idea and you're not really sure if it's better suited to be long or short, maybe start by boiling the concept down to its simplest idea while still feeling excited about it. Try to write it in its shortest form and ask yourself if it needs more. Can you give it an ending that makes sense? That satisfies? If you write the short version and realize there's still so much more on the bone that you want to chase, you can keep going! Breathe more into it, and let it unfurl. So many writers can't finish stories and wind up wasting precious time trying to figure out what MORE they can add to perfect an idea, when so often the answer is actually to write a whole lot less and just finish the damn thing. You can always add more later.

I've seen a lot of fear around the idea of "wasting" words or time on projects that never get finished, but that's not how I see it. I wrote about 80k words of a book in 2021 and wound up putting the whole thing down because it got boring for me. That wasn't a waste of my time. It was necessary practice and training. I'm a better writer now because I let myself write that. There are good ideas worth salvaging from it, and there are lines and moments that have been recycled into current projects. These projects continue to feed me even if they don't emerge fully formed. I'm always learning!

Going to the gym isn't a waste of time just because someone wasn't there to tell you what a good job you did. All practice is good practice. It feels like art is the only space in which that notion gets challenged, which is wild for writing in particular, considering most of the time, we're not even using physical materials. It's okay to try your idea out and let it fail. You will learn a lot from it regardless. But you'll learn even more if you finish it.

"But this idea is too precious to risk fucking it up."
It's not going anywhere. You can try it again in a year. Better yet, open your mind to the idea that you'll think of something even more unhinged and amazing to write once you've loosened up with your drafts and feel more confident finishing projects.

"I keep trying and I still can't finish this idea."
End it badly. Just finish it. So what if you have more editing to do than you thought? That's basically true for every project. No piece comes out perfect. Maybe you can't see the forest for all the trees here. Pull your head out of the minutiae of sentences and paragraphs and perfect words and just write a bullet point list to detail the action of the ending. Are you getting bored with the writing? The characters? Is the idea losing its shine? What can you do to bring that back? This is a great time to bring on a trusted friend as a reader and see what THEY liked about the piece.

Sometimes the most important thing is actually finding what you want to write, and letting a few of those "perfectly planned" details go in order to find the excitement again. I know I just wrote about how novels are full of intention and require care and precision but at the end of the day, that's not worth anything if you're not in love with the project.

Perhaps you're struggling with the difference between what you want to READ and what you want to WRITE. Perhaps you feel obligation to a certain underserved kind of character or story and you really wanted to do that justice. But maybe that's not where your strengths are. Maybe that's just not as much fun. Having fun is the actual best way to complete a project, so I strongly recommend using that to guide you.

Sometimes the only difference between completing and abandoning a project is confidence. The fastest way to build confidence in your ability to finish projects is to, yeah, you guessed it, finish a fucking project. A mediocre finished project that you can learn and grow and salvage ideas from often serves us better than a bunch of really cool projects that we only got partway through and then abandoned because we lost interest or got distracted and thought of a better idea. If you're sitting in a sea of unfinished projects, pick one and just finish it as an academic exercise, a gym session just for you. It's a workout, an experiment. It doesn't have to be great. It doesn't even have to be good. You're going to pick it apart like a cadaver in med school anyway.

(Fanworks can be wonderful to build confidence in the short term, but fanworks are inherently different than original works. It uses a different part of your brain. I love and respect fanworks for what they are and what they do for people, but I would not go so far as to say that fanworks can bridge this gap for you if you're having trouble finishing original works. Fanfiction is, on a very literal level, easier to write than original fiction, because you don't have to come up with every single aspect of the piece. Typically speaking, fanfiction is when you play with pre-existing characters and settings and ideas and worlds. It's a lending library, and it's awesome! But it's no wonder that original fiction is a lot harder. Everything is on you. That's intimidating as hell when you're not used to it.)

This rambled on way too long, but I hope it's useful food for thought. An idea can always be changed, but our expectations for it are often harder to negotiate. I would never have attempted VELVET two years ago. I had to learn first that I could finish books again, which I did by writing RAVEL (a book I no longer feel reflects who I am as a writer), failing to write the untitled dragon story, and then completing KNIVES IN YOUR EYES and finding out that yes, I can still be in love with a world even after writing nearly 200,000 words of it.