"For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel"
About this Quote
Lynn Abbey draws a line between two kinds of difficulty: the marathon of the novel and the high-wire act of the short story. A novel offers acreage. There is room to discover the plot as you go, to circle back and seed foreshadowing, to let characters reveal themselves through detours and subplots. Momentum can carry a writer forward; when one scene falters, another can take its place while the weak spot is reconsidered. The long form forgives a certain amount of wandering because its scale absorbs it.
A short story grants no such indulgence. Every line has to do at least two jobs at once: move the plot, sketch the character, imply the world, and press toward an ending that feels both inevitable and surprising. There is no time to warm up or settle in. Stakes must be established in a paragraph, a voice must be unmistakable by the second page, and the final image must resonate backward to illuminate everything that came before. Compression demands precision. The revision burden is often heavier, because a single misplaced sentence can topple the entire structure.
Abbey’s phrasing matters: for me. She is a veteran of both forms, from long-form fantasy novels to the shared-world Thieves' World anthologies she co-created and edited. Working in a shared universe sharpens the pressures of short fiction: strict word counts, continuity constraints, and neighboring stories that shape reader expectations. Within those limits, the smallest choices carry outsized consequences, and missteps cannot hide behind scale.
Her insight also acknowledges temperament. Some writers thrive on the sprint; others need the runway of a novel to find their rhythm. Abbey suggests that mastery is not about length but about the demands each form makes on attention, structure, and language. The short story is a crucible. The novel is a landscape. Each is hard, but the short form asks for flawless economy from the first syllable.
A short story grants no such indulgence. Every line has to do at least two jobs at once: move the plot, sketch the character, imply the world, and press toward an ending that feels both inevitable and surprising. There is no time to warm up or settle in. Stakes must be established in a paragraph, a voice must be unmistakable by the second page, and the final image must resonate backward to illuminate everything that came before. Compression demands precision. The revision burden is often heavier, because a single misplaced sentence can topple the entire structure.
Abbey’s phrasing matters: for me. She is a veteran of both forms, from long-form fantasy novels to the shared-world Thieves' World anthologies she co-created and edited. Working in a shared universe sharpens the pressures of short fiction: strict word counts, continuity constraints, and neighboring stories that shape reader expectations. Within those limits, the smallest choices carry outsized consequences, and missteps cannot hide behind scale.
Her insight also acknowledges temperament. Some writers thrive on the sprint; others need the runway of a novel to find their rhythm. Abbey suggests that mastery is not about length but about the demands each form makes on attention, structure, and language. The short story is a crucible. The novel is a landscape. Each is hard, but the short form asks for flawless economy from the first syllable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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