This week of Women in SF&F Month starts with an essay by A. G. Slatter! Her work includes The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings (winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection), Of Sorrow and Such (winner of the Ditmar Award for Best Novella), and The Path of Thorns (winner of the Aurealis and Australian Shadows Awards for Best Fantasy Novel). Her most recent novel, the gothic fantasy The Crimson Road, is described as “a tale of vampires, assassins, ancient witches and broken promises” and is set in the same world as several of her other works, both short and long. I’m thrilled she’s here today to discuss how she approaches writing stories of differing lengths in “The Long and the Short of It.”

About The Crimson Road:

Violet Zennor has had a peculiar upbringing. Training as a fighter in underground arenas, honing her skills against the worst scum, murderers and thieves her father could pit her against, she has learned to be ruthless. To kill.

Until the day Hedrek Zennor dies. Violet thinks she’s free — then she learns that her father planned to send her into the Darklands, where the Leech Lords reign. Where Violet’s still-born brother was taken years ago. Violet steadfastly refuses. Until one night two assassins attempt to slaughter her — and it becomes clear: she’s going to have to clean up the mess her father made.

By turns gripping and bewitching, sharp and audacious, this mesmerising story takes you on a journey into the dark heart of Slatter’s sinister and compelling fantasy world in a tale of vampires, assassins, ancient witches and broken promises.

The Long and the Short of It
By Angela Slatter

A question I find myself frequently asked is this: “How do you know whether an idea is a short story or a novel?”

The sad truth is that I don’t.

But I think that as a writer I’ve developed a habit of aiming an idea towards one form or the other — or the third, middling thing, a novella — and it’s a matter of discipline to keep things on track. My career now is less about scribbling a random short story that’s popped into my head and putting it in the “story bank” in the hope an editor will ask me for something or I’ll see a callout for just that very thing. Mostly it’s now a matter of an editor approaching me and asking, “Would you write a story for this anthology? Here’s the deadline.” Most editors who work with me nowadays have done so for a long while and are aware that when I say “Yes”, it means that while I’ll probably be two standard earth weeks late, I will have something for them. It’s definitely not an approach I’d recommend, especially if you’re just starting out, and make no mistake: I’m in a privileged position and I recognise and appreciate that. However, I’ve also been doing this for going on twenty years and if a few advantages had not accrued to me over that time then I’d definitely be biting a lot more people than I currently do.

Anyhoo: that story will generally be written from scratch because I simply don’t have the deposits in the story bank I used to when I was a carefree baby writer making notes on cocktail napkins and post-it notes. I do have some files on the laptop that are “story stubs”, i.e. fragments that have occurred as just seeds of what-ifs or character sketches, and I do go back sometimes to those when I’m looking for a spark. While I’d absolutely love to be able to sit down and tinker with constructing a new mosaic collection set in the Sourdough world, all newly written tales, it’s just not on the cards at the moment because mostly my time’s currently spent writing novels and novellas, which are very different beasts.

I suppose the thing that’s foremost in my mind when I get an idea I think might go the distance from points A to Z, is the structure and what it requires in each case, whether I’m writing a short story or a novel — or a novella.

For a short story, I can begin with a scrap of an idea, and by that I genuinely mean an anorexic noodle of a thought, and as long as I keep in mind that there should be three acts, what each act is meant to do in terms of function in the narrative, and keep each act roughly a similar length, I can use word count as a guide (even I can manage that math!). Mostly, the story will come in at around the right number of words. Although, having said that, I confess that I recently subbed a requested story that was meant to be 6,000 words but, errr, ended up almost 9,000 words. Fortunately for me the editor was okay with that — a rare and lucky occurrence — and, again, definitely not an approach I’d recommend.

Usually I’m in better control of the wordage because I’m mindful of not causing a blowout. That is, I’m disciplined about keeping these things in mind as I write:

• not over describing the setting;
• choosing descriptions that give the sharpest and simplest impression for the reader’s imagination;
• using sensory or emotive descriptions that trigger a reader’s familiarity with an experience to engage their feelings quickly;
• keeping dialogue direct but letting it do some of the foreshadowing and mood setting;
• keeping the narrative wrapped tightly around the idea that a short story is about crisis, choice, and/or consequence;
• and, above all, not introducing new characters every time I’ve got a new piece of information to bring in or a new action that needs to be done. Not to sound toxic, but it’s like calorie counting for the story.

I personally don’t find that approach restrictive, but rather the above are helpful guidelines for my first draft. It means I’m mostly colouring inside the lines, so to speak. I’ll start to embellish in the next draft, where I’m figuring out what’s important and what might have seemed like a great idea at 2 a.m. but now is just something that’s not very strong and can either be removed or repurposed. Maybe that line I threw in as padding for the setting or to layer a character, something I thought was a neat kind of throw-away? Well, on the redrafting that might show itself to be a really good idea, something to be developed and add genuine depth to the story. Always remember that your first draft is never your last draft (no matter how brilliant you might think it is in the minutes, hours, days and weeks after you’ve just written it).

When it comes to an idea for a novel, however, I think about it like walking across a whole world, not just taking a turn around a garden. There’s so much more for me to show the reader, not just about the characters and their lives, but also the place in which they live, how it’s affected and continues to affect them while the plot moves forward, and how they affect that environment in turn. Thinking about your character and wondering what in their past might break them or make them stronger. This is where you can pull out the backstory and give it a really good shake — not in the form of infodumps, obviously, but like you’re examining all the threads in the warp and weft of someone’s lifeline as it’s being woven by the Fates. It’s been observed by folk cleverer than I that a short story is a single facet examined in detail, a novel is the entire gem being held up. With a novel, I work with structure again, breaking it into four acts rather than three; again, each part has a specific function in the narrative in terms of what each reveals and how it moves the plot forward.

For a novella? In my practice, this is where the stuff listed above kind of intersects. You need more detail than you’ll give in a short story, but you also don’t want to include the same level of detail as a novel. The scope of your plot is going to be narrower in terms of the story you’re telling. I give fewer glimpses into the backstory and try to keep the plot relatively simple in terms of how many threads make it up — but note that doesn’t mean fewer plot twists because you’ve got to keep the reader engaged. So, again, structure is my guide, and I split the novella into four acts, same as with a novel, and assign a basic word count to each act. Personally, I really like the novella form for playing around with different ways of telling a story — The Bone Lantern (Absinthe Press) is three tales woven together, one of them is the frame tale for the other two; Fitcher’s Bird (which I’ve just finished writing for Titan) is a mix of different points of view around a single fairy tale. I find the shorter length is great for trying new things without it becoming so unwieldy that I lose track of the story.

Another consideration for deciding whether an idea becomes a short story, novella or novel is how I want the main character to come out at the end. How changed are they? Will the length of the piece convince the reader that the character will have undergone a particular degree of development in 3,000 words? Or will it require a greater length to bring them over to my way of thinking? In terms of the plot, what do I want to happen? Not just to the character but to the setting, the world in which everything occurs — can I convincingly tell a tale in which a world changes overnight in 4,000 words or less — or will that feel rushed? Am I giving too much setting detail? Am I using four pages to describe a marketplace when three paragraphs will do? Let me reiterate: short stories are about looking at a single facet of the tale in detail; the novel is about a whole bunch of facets — the entire gem is held up to the light and rotated so you can examine every part of it. And the novella? Somewhere in the middle — something you’d like fries with…

So, is there any way to know whether your idea is a short story, a novella or a novel? Or even if it’s going to go the distance to any of those forms — or just curl up for a dirt nap on the road to Writerville?

Not for me, no. I don’t ever know if an idea will lend itself to a novel or a short story, but I think I’ve developed an instinct for how to apply an idea to the shorter or longer form. Part of that is discipline, part of that is how I can “see” the story in my mind’s eye at its end. Keep in mind that I sometimes do go back and extend a short story to use as part of a novel — the short story “Brisneyland by Night” became part of the supernatural crime novel Vigil, and the short story “The Summer Husband” is part of the novel A Forest Darkly which I’m working on now. I’ve been able to do this because some shorts lend themselves to either being a standalone chapter in a larger work, or something that can be sliced up and dropped in at various points in the narrative as part of the greater plot because I could envisage it as part of something larger. Or because I had a feeling, even when I wrote “The End” that I wasn’t quite finished with the characters — because I wanted to know their next ending. Not every short story will lend itself to this! Do I know which ones will? Nope. Sorry!

So, for me, structure is my guardrail as I write — I try not to use it as a restriction, but just a control experiment. These techniques work for me. My caveat is this: my techniques won’t work for every writer — we’re all different, we have different habits to help us get our words down, and get our projects finished. So, this is in no way me laying down the law (or lore!) — this is just a “what works for me” essay on the long and the short of it (and the middling thing). My general writing advice is to try as many techniques as you can, see what works for you — but if it doesn’t adapt to your habits within 3 weeks, then give up that particular technique. I say this because writing is hard enough without adding an extra obstacle to your practice.

But if you ever work out the magic formula of which idea becomes a short, a medium or a long? Let me know!

A.G. Slatter has won a Shirley Jackson Award, a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, three Australian Shadows Awards and eight Aurealis Awards. Most recently, All the Murmuring Bones was shortlisted for the 2021 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards Book of the Year and the 2021 Shirley Jackson Award; The Path of Thorns won the 2022 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel and the 2022 Australian Shadows Award for Best Novel. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006. Angela’s short stories have appeared in many Best Of anthologies, and her work has been translated into many languages. She lives in Brisbane, Australia.