Novels and Short Stories: Can Writers Do Both?

Some have argued that writers can only be good at one or the other. Is it true?

My kitchen. Photo by me.

One winter, a fledgling local literary magazine hosted workshops at Open Book in downtown Minneapolis. I remember gathering around a long wooden table with the magazine’s young editors and other writers. At the head of the table one evening was a writer who had graduated from the University of Minnesota’s MFA program and had recently published a story in a prestigious journal. 

We talked about the necessity of killing darlings, about Sandra Cisneros’ novel Caramelo, which he called a “disaster” (am I the only person who liked that book?) and whether writers can be good at writing both novels and short stories. He asserted that the answer was no: you can either be a good short story writer or a good novelist. Not both. 

This, of course, is possibly one of the most ridiculous statements ever uttered. The list of writers who have crafted excellent stories and novels in equal measure is longer than Santa’s naughty-and-nice scroll. I suspect that the individual who made this bold pronouncement had failed in his attempts to write novels and was comforting himself with the idea that you can only be good at one. 

However, short stories and novels do present different challenges. Why is it that while writing a novel, I can sometimes struggle to add 1,800 words, while I can crank out a 3,000-word story in the same amount of time? Why is it sometimes easier to fill a short story with elegant sentences and gorgeous metaphors? Why do novels sometimes have less poetry than stories? 

It’s like decorating a house. When you do just one room, it’s easy to focus on the details. My mother and I have been working to restore our kitchen to what it may have looked like in 1935 when the house was built. We replaced all of the cabinet knobs and drawer pulls with vintage glass ones appropriate to the period. We found a wallpaper pattern on Spoonflower and chose marmoleum tiles to create a classic checkerboard pattern on the floor. We chose a paint color that matched the original tile backsplash, which we discovered after prying off a sheet of Formica that had been glued over it. I even found a vintage clock to complete the look. 

A short story is a single room, a self-contained space that frees you to focus on details once you’ve got the layout figured out.

A novel, on the other hand, is a house you build from scratch. You want to decorate, and sometimes you do as you go along, but your main objective when you’re writing the first draft of a novel is to just keep building. Wallpaper, clocks and drawer pulls can wait. I do think it’s important to go back and add detail, otherwise, you end up with a whole house done up in Millennial Gray, which is as depressing as it is boring. 

Novel writing puts pressure on a writer in a way that short stories don’t. Each chapter has to fit into a larger narrative, and sometimes thinking about the larger narrative can hinder the flow. The key is to commit and keep writing. I wonder if the writer I met that winter night had a hard time with that pressure and gave up. That’s his right. It’s fine to be someone who writes short stories and not novels. But he was wrong to declare that nobody can do it. 

A lot has changed since that winter night. The literary magazine that hosted the workshops has since gone dormant. I published a novel of my own. Substack emerged to present new opportunities for writers to create and connect. I don’t know what became of that writer; I can’t remember his name, and in my memory, he speaks with a British accent he may not have had. 

In the years since that night, I’ve learned that the question isn’t whether writers can be successful at both longer and shorter works, it’s whether writers can be successful, period. Sometimes I look at the publishing landscape and wonder whether I should take my dream out behind the shed and shoot it. But barring any significant life changes, I’ll probably still spend my Saturday mornings in a coffee shop writing — novels and stories.