Just a few quick thoughts for today. 

People sometimes assume a novel is just a short story that kept going, the way a marathon is just a sprint that didn’t stop. In my experience, that’s not quite right. The two feel like genuinely different creatures to write, even though they’re built from exactly the same starting point.

They Both Start the Same Way

Every piece I write, short story or novel, begins identically: an idea, at least twenty minutes, and a minimum of four or five hundred words. At that stage, I genuinely don’t know which one I’m holding. Some of my favourite short stories stayed exactly that size and were better for it. Shuttlers started the same way and quietly grew into my first full-length novel without ever announcing it would.

That is, until Annalisa told me I needed to write a book in a single genre. Then, the ideas kept coming and wouldn’t stop. In fact, I’ve had so many that I’m working on a sequel!

The Real Difference Is Endurance

A short story asks the Muse for a sprint: one idea, fully realised, done. A novel asks her to keep showing up, day after day, for a world that has to hold together over tens of thousands of words rather than a few thousand. That’s a completely different kind of demand, and not every idea has that kind of stamina in it. Some don’t need it. Some would be worse for it. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like certain authors: they pad their stories with fluff, constantly breaking the flow of the action.

As Annalisa says, “Does this sentence need to be here? Does it move the story’s action forward? If it doesn’t, it doesn’t belong here.”

Editing Is a Different Beast, Too

Read, revise, edit, repeat applies to both, but the scale changes everything. Editing a short story is close, careful work on a small canvas. Editing a novel is like painting a mural. It means holding the whole shape of something enormous in your head at once, making sure a detail introduced in chapter two still makes sense by chapter twenty. Not only that, but you have to keep an eye open for the possibilities of foreshadowing, backlinking to previous parts of the story, and ensuring that the characters are consistent and continuous. This is where plot holes start creeping in if you are not careful. 

I find the short story edits exhausting in a sprint sort of way. The novel edits are exhausting like a long, slow climb.

How I Know Which One I’m Writing?

Mostly, I don’t, not at first. I just keep following the Muse and see how far she wants to take it. If the idea keeps needing more of itself, it’s a novel, or at least a novella. I’ve written a few of those, too. If it says everything it needs to say in a few thousand words and then goes quiet, it was always a short story, and I’ve learned not to force it to be anything bigger than that.

Thirty published short stories and a couple of published novels in, I still can’t always tell at the start which one I’m holding. I rather like that I can’t.

One last thought: when I first started writing my epic novel, I was worried that I would end up with something maybe only 40,000 or 50,000 words long. I already have 147,000 words, and I reckon there could be another 30,000 or 40,000 to complete it. Once my Muse gets loose on a project, she can get a little bit verbose.