Length of writing

There is a significant amount of difference between how one would write a a short story and a novel. Not only in how the story itself is written, how you detail and pace your scenes, but how you as a writer do the writing. You have to know far more about what you are writing, the world that you are experiencing, what people are doing and how they affect one another. Things become a lot bigger, which makes sense, but you don't fully understand it until you go and do it.

Novels are what I want to write. I've written for a long time, and until now, I have always tried to write long pieces like that. I have not been overly successful, though I have had one or two finished rough drafts. Looking back on them, as proud as I am of the fact that I actually finished, I know that they are far from ready to be published. They're not that long as far as novels go, and they don't sufficiently build a world or their characters the way I want them to. Those are things that can be fixed in editing, but I feel like I can't do justice to the story in those ways without more experience.

Which is why I'm doing this blog. But like I said, there are a lot of differences between how you write short stories and long stories. So why would I intentionally choose to write pieces daily that are miles shorter than the things that I want to write on the whole?

The answer is because they force me to think. They force me to understand what I'm writing without having the space to explore it. This is something I've never done to myself before. When you start out writing long pieces, you steal from yourself a need of understanding. Or at least I did. When you spend a full book writing, thinking what the world around you is without having to sit down and take a second to lay the whole thing out in front of you, you just never get around to it. The world makes sense to me, because I have the luxury of spending days, months, even years exploring it. But when you read that story, you don't have that much time. You don't get an intimate understanding of it like I do when I'm reading it.

But in a short story, I barely have any more time than you do. Especially the way I write, just going full out, never stopping to plan. I start writing as soon as I get an idea, and I don't stop until that idea is realized.

But in a novel, I don't have that much time. Doing that would be a number of days, possibly even weeks straight of absolutely nothing but writing. So I spend time not writing thinking about writing. And that's why I have that understanding of a world that never makes it into the book.

But I need that to make it into the book. And so I spend time not thinking. Just writing. And so I am trying to fit a world into a more condensed space. So that hopefully I will learn to take that world and expand it into something giant and beautiful.

Eventually.