Sprints and marathons

I've been thinking a lot about short stories, lately, mostly because I've been working on a number consecutively and because I'll be on the MWA Symposium panel "Short Stories vs. Novels: The Long and Short of It." After playing around with all sorts of metaphors--subtractive vs. additive art, dough analogies, and the like--the thing that seemed to make the most sense, the most recently was a running metaphor. It's entirely possible someone's already come up with this, but it seemed to work for me.

For example: I sent an early draft of my last story to several readers, feeling like I had it pretty well in shape. Then one reader wanted more world-building, another wanted more characterization, and a third wanted some depth of detail on something else--I don't remember what.

Thing was, I had three words left of my total word limit and these were valid suggestions. How do you wedge that kind of atmosphere into a story that already is plenty dense? Lots have folks have knowledgeably spoken about making "every word do double-duty," and I think it may be closer to triple- or quadruple-duty. Can you turn a short sentence about looking at a watch into a sentence expressing timing/tension, social class, emotion, physicality, personality, and physical description? You're gonna have to, if you write short stories. I ended up doing a lot of paring back of some descriptions and reloading others, so I could cram all the nuance I wanted into the story. It's all about weight distribution and conservation: reuse, recycle, reduce.

There's something about an expense of energy, too. Short stories are sprints. All the power gets expended in one short burst, and it has to happen within a specific length. You can't hold anything back, not even for a second. Novels are something a reader can settle into for the long haul, so you need to keep the pace steady, but adjust it periodically to suit the requirements of the terrain. Yes, you want the prose to be tight and clean, but not so spare the reader has no place to grab onto, no desire to follow the story through the whole book.

Nothing new here, but writing it down makes it likely I'll keep the lesson in mind for the next story. And I surely am looking forward to hearing what my E(vil) T(win), S.J. Rozan, Toni Kelner, and Ace Atkins have to say about the subject at the Symposium in late April.