Someone (probably Stephen Donaldson in the preface to Daughter of Regals, but I can’t be bothered to prove that) once wrote that the short story is to the novel as champagne is to beer. He meant that the short story, being far more concentrated that the novel, has to be far more artful to achieve greatness; there was a clear implication that he considered the short story a higher artistic achievement.
Someone else (I could look it up if I were at home, but I’m not so I won’t) once compared a great short story to a well-appointed room, while a great novel is more like a well-appointed house. Her or his point was that a great novel, being so much much vaster in scope than any short story, requires more from the writer, and thus is a greater achievement.
If you were to compare a list of, say, the 100 greatest short stories to a list of the 100 greatest novels*, I think that, while not taking away from the greatness of the short stories, the novels would represent a greater achievement.
*use whatever criteria you want, as long as they’re the same for both lists. I did a little googling to see if I could find anyone who had assembled two such lists that I could easily compare, but didn’t come up with anything that really satisfied me, so I just thought about what sorts of works my own lists would contain if I went to the trouble of assembling them.
It takes more storytelling talent to do a short well than it does a novel. A novel can wander fairly far afield and still bring the tale home because it has more area in which to work. Shorts have to be worked close in.
I agree with this. I know it doesnt work the same way (production values, budget, and profits being totally different) but I think the short movie/feature length movie analogy works well here.
It’s far harder, in truth, to make a good short movie than a good average length film. Leave aside all the budget considerations, and focus on just storytelling. Being interesting straight away, and having no room for wandering around is what makes short stories (either in film or books) greater achievements for me.
Also they stick in your mind far better. When you think about a book, you think about parts of the book, when you remember a short story, you remember the whole of it. Greater impact, in my opinion, than regular books.
I voted aye, for two reasons: First, I’m a fan of science fiction, and the best SF is all in short story form. Ultimately, SF is all about taking a single idea, and seeing where it leads. Putting that in a novel means you’ve got a lot of filler (which isn’t necessarily bad, mind you, just not “pure” SF).
Second, work done under constraints is always more interesting than unconstrained work. Michelangelo’s David becomes more impressive, not less, when you learn that it was carved out of a cracked block of marble that he got cheap because it was “unusable”. Likewise, it’s harder to tell a story when you have only a few pages to do it in, so when it’s done successfully it’s that much greater an achievement.
Nay. The assertion is self-fulfilling. Merely “cutting out the filler” does not equal greatness. Given equal greatness-density, a work that can sustain the same density over a greater length is of course, greater. Some short stories are better than certain novels, but this is a simple fact of math and nothing inherent about the medium.
I voted No Answer because each serves their purpose. The distilled essence of insight or emotion captured in a great short-story is as elegant as an elemental math equation. And the epic worlds created in books like War & Peace, Dune and Shogan can’t be found in 25,000 words. It’s all good.
The old trope “Hemingway was a good novelist, but his best form was the short story” is true for me - his hard-boiled style slams home when he uses it to deliver his insight. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber still blows me away.
And Gatsby was only 50,000 words as it is - a novella, really.
As usual, physicist, you have expressed my opinions more succinctly than I, though I love non-sf short stories more than you. All I’ll add is that I took Donaldson’s remark to mean that he thought a great short story was *harder *to achieve than a great novel; it does not necessarily folllow that the novel is a lesser assay. It’s sort of like shooting an arrow at a target. Writing the greatest of the great short stories is hitting dead center.