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msagaraWriting short stories is absolutely the fastest way to gain skill. Amateurs will say "but I only write novels!" Pros know better.
--Advice from a published writer, offered on Twitter
I am obviously an Amateur.
My first two professional sales were novels (to Ballantine Del Rey). Did I try to write shorts? Well, yes. Two. The third attempt was a novel. And, since "Pros know better" and my opinion is that writing short stories is the fastest way to gain skill at writing short stories, I suppose I would still be classed as an Amateur.
For my writing process, novels and short stories require two different skill sets.
If you've never written any fiction, short stories might be a good place to start, because you have to learn a basic toolset (grammar, English, viewpoint, etc.), but when you polish it up, what you have is a toolset geared to the writing of short stories.
There is nothing wrong with this. All of the very excellent Ted Chiang's output to date has been in the short form. But if you, like me, tend to gravitate toward stories whose definition of short spans two volumes, I don't see any reason why the piece of twitter advice on display above should apply to you.
The idea that Amateurs balk and Pros know better is not actually materially true. In the survey from the numbers-obsessed-and-we-love-him-for-it![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jimhines, just under half of the respondents made zero short sales before selling their first novel. While it is possible that they honed their craft writing short stories that they were never once able to sell, I mostly doubt it.
So if short stories are not your natural inclination, why, you can be an Amateur too!
You can write a novel and sell it well before you've sold a short piece. My first published fiction was a short story that I'd sold two months before its publication; my first professional sale was a novel, which took almost two years to see print. There were eighteen months between the sale of my first novel and the sale of my first short story, and between that time, I had sold two more novels. More germane, however, is that I wrote that short story after I finished three novels worth of writing.
It's possible that in my case, I had to write the novels to begin to approach the toolset necessary to write short fiction.
If you love short stories and the short form, learning aspects of craft while writing short stories makes good sense. If you don't even read short stories, and so many readers in my store don't, starting a career attempting to write them seems about as germane to professional development as attempting to write a Romance without reading them at all.
So if you are even the tiniest bit concerned about your ability to be taken seriously as a writer if you aren't starting with short stories? You can come stand in my Amateur corner, where I promise not to shake my head while you practice your craft writing novels.
Edited because "being" and "begin" are not the same words, even if they contain the same letters.
--Advice from a published writer, offered on Twitter
I am obviously an Amateur.
My first two professional sales were novels (to Ballantine Del Rey). Did I try to write shorts? Well, yes. Two. The third attempt was a novel. And, since "Pros know better" and my opinion is that writing short stories is the fastest way to gain skill at writing short stories, I suppose I would still be classed as an Amateur.
For my writing process, novels and short stories require two different skill sets.
If you've never written any fiction, short stories might be a good place to start, because you have to learn a basic toolset (grammar, English, viewpoint, etc.), but when you polish it up, what you have is a toolset geared to the writing of short stories.
There is nothing wrong with this. All of the very excellent Ted Chiang's output to date has been in the short form. But if you, like me, tend to gravitate toward stories whose definition of short spans two volumes, I don't see any reason why the piece of twitter advice on display above should apply to you.
The idea that Amateurs balk and Pros know better is not actually materially true. In the survey from the numbers-obsessed-and-we-love-him-for-it
jimhines, just under half of the respondents made zero short sales before selling their first novel. While it is possible that they honed their craft writing short stories that they were never once able to sell, I mostly doubt it.So if short stories are not your natural inclination, why, you can be an Amateur too!
You can write a novel and sell it well before you've sold a short piece. My first published fiction was a short story that I'd sold two months before its publication; my first professional sale was a novel, which took almost two years to see print. There were eighteen months between the sale of my first novel and the sale of my first short story, and between that time, I had sold two more novels. More germane, however, is that I wrote that short story after I finished three novels worth of writing.
It's possible that in my case, I had to write the novels to begin to approach the toolset necessary to write short fiction.
If you love short stories and the short form, learning aspects of craft while writing short stories makes good sense. If you don't even read short stories, and so many readers in my store don't, starting a career attempting to write them seems about as germane to professional development as attempting to write a Romance without reading them at all.
So if you are even the tiniest bit concerned about your ability to be taken seriously as a writer if you aren't starting with short stories? You can come stand in my Amateur corner, where I promise not to shake my head while you practice your craft writing novels.
Edited because "being" and "begin" are not the same words, even if they contain the same letters.
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no subject
Date: 2010-09-09 05:02 am (UTC)One of the panelists was a senior editor with a Big Name House. This editor sat on the panel and told the audience, flat out with no qualifiers, that the sure way to get an agent and sell a novel was to first make a name for yourself as a short story writer. And when asked what you should do if you just weren't very good at short stories, senior editor's answer was by god, you better learn if you wanted to be a real professional.
I knew better, my friend knew better, but we sat there and watched the faces of others in the room. You could pick out the real newbie writers by the despair on their faces or the utter panic in their eyes. This was word from on high. This must be true.
Then the real fun started. The two agents on the panel told this senior editor--politely--that he was full of it up to his bushy eyebrows. Senior editor found it difficult to believe that neither of the agents on the panel could even NAME a single SF/F short story market and that they flat out didn't care about them. All these agents cared about was a writer's ability to write novels, not shorts.
While I don't regret all the time I spent focusing on short stories, I do wish I'd spent less time trying to master the short form. Novels are what I'm good at. Novels are what I should have been practicing from the beginning.
And if that makes me an Amateur, with a capital A, in the eyes of certain people, I can live with that.