pays the grocery bills.) Then there are the reviews, be they brilliant or misguided, or occasionally brilliant and misguided, which tell you a little bit about how the message was received or misunderstood. They don’t pay the grocery bills, but they still matter to us.
But the feedback from a novel is slow to arrive, and thin beer indeed after the amount of effort that went into fermenting the brew.
Imagine you’ve got an office job. You go to work every day, and there’s a perk: the office is about ten feet from your bedroom door. (No lengthy commute!) You sit in that office—alone, for the most part—and write, hopefully without interruption or human companionship. Sometimes you get bored and take a day or two off, or go do the housework, or go shopping. And sometimes you find yourself working there at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night because you took Friday off, and Thursday before it, and your demon conscience is whispering in your ear, reminding you to put in the hours. You’re almost always on your own.
You’ll find it generally takes somewhere between a month and a year to write a novel—sometimes more, sometimes less. And once it’s written, you deliver it to your agent or editor, and it disappears for a couple of months. Then it reappears as a job in the publisher’s production queue, moving in lockstep through a series of well-defined processes on its way to being turned into cartons of finished books. There’s a little wiggle room, but in general if you turn in a book, it will take a year to show up in hardcover (and then another year before it’s reprinted in paperback).
So: once a year, you get the fanfare and fireworks show of a new book coming into print. And then the reviews and reader comments trickle in, usually over a period of a couple of months. Then the long silence resumes, punctuated by the odd piece of fan mail (a surprising proportion of which is concerned with pointing out the same hugely significant typo on page seven—that escaped both you and your editors—as the previous sixteen e-mails) . . .
Short stories are different: they push the reward-feedback button much more frequently than novels. (And that’s why a lot of us start out writing short stories before we tackle novels.) There’s an addictive quality to writing short stories, like being a rat in a behavioral-science experiment that rewards correct performance of some complex task with a little electric shock to the medial forebrain bundle. Not only do they not take months or years to write (when things are going well, it’s more like hours or days), but you can send them out to a magazine or anthology editor with some hope of hearing back within a couple of months. Better still, if a magazine decides to buy your story, it can be in print in a couple of months. Push the button harder, rat! It’s great training for acquiring the motivation to engage with the bigger, slower job of writing a novel.
The speed of the short-story publication cycle brings me to the second reason I write them: I get to play with new ideas in a way I can’t manage at novel length. Novels are huge, cumbersome projects that take a long time to bolt together; in contrast, short stories are a quick vehicle for trying out something new, the fiction writer’s experimental workbench. I can focus on a particular idea or technique to the exclusion of everything else—which brings it into focus and lets me explore it to the full without worrying about whether it unbalances the plot development or fits with the protagonist’s motivations or whatever.
The lack of money also means there’s less at stake. If I’m working on a novel, I can’t afford to try out an untested new writing technique in it. At worst, I might end up having to throw six months’ writing in the trash when it proves unfixable: a mess in any situation, and potentially catastrophic if you’re self-employed and working to deadline. But I can take a day or two off to write a short story and see if it works: throw it at a magazine, put it out in public, and see if my readers throw rotten tomatoes or gold sovereigns. Or, for a bigger idea—a new stylistic experiment, for example—I can treat it as a pilot project for a novel: take a month, write a couple of novelettes or a novella, find a