Short stories versus Novels

I love to write short stories. It seems that every time I want to try something new that is where I turn.  There is something that is lovely about a short sweet story that lets you explore a new idea or style.  When I wrote my short story Rapture it was to try to help cope with my recent loss of a beloved family pet. My story Save the Last Dance was a trial of meshing a dystopian story with a contrasting image.  In the case of this story it was the song and dance of Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly.

While I love to write short stories I have found that I struggle to read short story collections, anthologies, and even those in magazines.  I find it refreshing to sample something small without committing to an entire novel.  It's like the free samples at the grocery store, all the flavor with none of the obligation of buying a twenty pound box of frozen tacos.  Yet if you have too much of the same subject, writer, or style it can become stale rather quickly.  This is why I can go through a novel in a week yet it can take me up to a year to get through a short story collection.

So as I was sitting at home sick this last week, unable to write, unwilling to read for fear of my brain acting up with fever dreams, I had something to ponder.  I began to wonder why it was that the short story collection I was working on still had at least one hundred pages left, I'd only been reading it for about a year.  In the same time I had read probably at least twenty novels, if not more.

The conclusion that I came up with is that there is a thread of continuity in a novel which keeps us reading.  While a chocolate sampler is nice from time to time we generally have recipes and foods we eat weekly.  We go back to the same treats, cakes, or dishes that makes us happy time after time.  This is what the novel does, it prepares us something that we like just with some new developments, twists, or characters.

Let's use macaroni and cheese as our example as most people have polarizing feelings towards it.  There is something nostalgic about going back to our childhood with hot dogs and mac and cheese.  You can dress it up by making it from scratch, adding four, six, even eight types of cheese.  You can throw a curve ball at us by adding something like bell pepper, bacon, or even some sun dried tomatoes to the mix.  In the end though it is still something we know and are comfortable with deep down inside.

When you look at the stories of your favorite authors many of them fall into very similar plot patterns. These are our comfort foods, the foods for thought.  For Stephen King I'd say it's a slow burn horror, the story builds pressure like a pressure cooker, and in the end you are never sure if you'll find the ending really satisfying.  I know the characters are going to be well developed, and that I will find myself passionately questioning whether they really should have made key decisions.  I love Stephen King and when I'm in the mood for something like this it is the first place I turn.  Yet even when I find a collection of his like Four Past Midnight or Different Seasons I can't seem to read straight through it.

There is something to be said about the beauty of a novel.  When done right it'll make you turn pages in the way an anthology won't.  When it's done you feel satisfied and can walk away happy (most of the time) as though you'd just left an all-you-can-eat buffet.  You've had your meal and you don't have a bunch of stuff still on the plate, as it often is with anthologies.  The story is ready to be digested and you can start deciding what you want for dinner.

With this revelation I'll probably still read short story anthologies, but I won't plan to get through it as fast as I would a novel.  Sometimes you just want a sample, sometimes you want the full meal.