So says my friend and co-writer Daniel Knibb, http://danielknibb.weebly.com/1/post/2014/03/small-is-beautiful.html … talking about George Saunders, who has just won the Folio Prize with a collection of short stories. Good for him! Short stories have languished in the margins of literature for a long time, except in particular genres like science fiction and romance. And there's no earthly reason for that any more, just as there's no need for a novel to be 80,000 to 120,000 words long.
Nowadays, with epublishing on the rise, the old strictures have lost their raison d'etre. In print, the publisher needed to know how long the book would be, for reasons to do with cost and storage space. If you'd written something too long or too short, you had to cut it down or pad it out to fit. It had nothing to do with the writing itself and, while cutting bits out usually improves a piece of writing, adding bits in is more contentious. But now, that's all going out of the window. Your novel, or novella, or short story, or flash, can be as long or short as you like - though small is definitely more beautiful these days, and even tiny weeny flashes are getting more popular; just the right length to read on your phone while you're waiting for a bus. So there's everything to play for. And I'm looking forward to going out to play; just as soon as the novel is
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |