“When I returned to short stories, I'd started working on what is still central to much of what I try to do: putting myself in the place of the alien rather than describing it from an outside point of view.” TryingStillsStoriesViewsPoint Of ViewAliensShort StoryDescribing Author:Karin Tidbeck
“Some stories I write in Swedish, some in English. Short stories I've almost exclusively written in English lately, mostly because there's such a small market for them in Sweden and it doesn't really pay either. So, the translation goes both ways. What also factors in is that I have a different voice in English, which means that a straight translation wouldn't be the same as if I'd written it in English originally.” IfsWayWritingMeanDifferentStoriesVoicePayWrittenFactorsShort StoryTranslationsSwedenSwedishDifferent Voices Author:Karin Tidbeck
“I'm used to writing short stories, which is primarily what I like to read.” WritingStoriesUsedShort StoryWriting ShortWriting Short Stories Author:Matthew Healy
“I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers.” KnowsMeanStoriesHappensImaginationAttentionReaderDetailsProseShort StoryAmbiguityLiteralOrbitAttention SpanStory Writers Author:Matthew Healy
“This was my first novel [The Dissemblers ]. I've never seriously written short stories, and actually find short stories much more intimidating as an art form than novels.” FirstsArtStoriesFormNovelWrittenShort StoryIntimidating Author:Liza Campbell
“Rob Horton, the main character of The Tiger Rising, was a secondary character in an adult short story I wrote, and he wouldn't go away after I'd finished the short story. I couldn't figure out what he wanted, so I wrote to find out.” CharacterStoriesWantedFiguresAdultsFinishedRisingGoing AwayShort StoryTigersMain Characters Author:Kate DiCamillo
“I've been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University.” WritingYearsStatesStoriesCreativeProgramTwentiesUniversityShort StoryCreative WritingSan FranciscoAnd OffWriting ShortWriting Short Stories Author:Andrew Lam
“The Prodigal Son story is, I think, the greatest short-story ever written. It has such drama in it, such great characters, it's so clear and concise, and it's entertaining in the sense that everyone can relate to it. But you have no doubt what our Lord was trying to communicate in the heart of that story. So the truth was not sacrificed on the altar of entertainment in that case. And it can be.” ThinkingTryingHeartCharacterStoriesLordCasesClearDoubtWrittenSonDramaEntertainmentCommunicateRelateNo DoubtShort StoryEntertainingOur LordAltarsGreat CharacterProdigalsConciseProdigal Son Author:Max Lucado
“I love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. The novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. I don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.” WritingLongDifferentFactsStoriesRunningAgeFormUniverseDifferencesNovelToo MuchDistanceBoundsControlledShort StoryLong DistanceTangledDifferent DirectionsShort LoveDistance RunningWriting ShortWriting Short StoriesLong Distance Running Author:Colum McCann
“Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.” IfsStoriesLanguageDifficultNovelPerfectionShort StoryJuggling Author:Colum McCann
“I'll take a [Pavel] Chekhov comparison any day! He's of course one of the great masters at the short story form, and has helped define traditional conflict as we understand it.” StoriesFormCoursesMastersConflictTraditionalComparisonShort StoryChekhov Author:Alexander Weinstein
“I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it.” StoriesTeenagerShort Story Author:John Darnielle
“I had lots of time to read [being a lawyer] what I hadn't read in my school and college days. Being a bad student I barely passed my exams and I barely bothered about books. It was sports all the time. I started reading and got involved in literature and writing. The few cases I handled gave me the material for my early short stories.” WritingBookStoriesSchoolReadingLiteratureSportsCasesStudentsCollegeMaterialsInvolvedLawyerShort StoryBotheredExamCollege Days Author:Khushwant Singh
“Novels definitely come more naturally to me. When I write short stories, it's always a fight against it expanding.” WritingStoriesFightingNovelShort StoryExpanding Author:Maggie Shipstead
“I think I'm someone who can prattle on a long time about something, which serves me well as a novelist, but it's the enemy when I'm writing short stories.” ThinkingWritingWellsLongStoriesEnemyLong TimeNovelistsShort StoryWriting ShortWriting Short Stories Author:Maggie Shipstead
“I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.” FeelsWritingLongStoriesAgeWantedDifficultNovelExampleTeenagerProseShort StoryRespectableToothbrushes Author:Sylvia Plath
“We have two boys. After George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, we had to explain to our older son, who was 12 at the time, how that could happen. Instead of hugging and consoling him, my husband pulled out a documentary about Emmett Till and showed it to him and started to talk about how the justice system works in this country - and how it often doesn't. From that conversation, our son wrote a short story about Trayvon Martin going to heaven to meet Emmett Till.” TwoCountryStoriesHappensFoundHeavenJusticeBoysSonHusbandConversationKillingGuiltyMy HusbandShort StoryHugDocumentariesJustice SystemConsolingNot GuiltyGoing To HeavenTrayvon MartinEmmett TillTrayvonZimmerman Author:Gina Prince-Bythewood
“Considering that "literary fiction" is a sub-genre that's not quite the same as "literature," either, it follows that the short, semi-humorous bits posted online for all to see are something absolutely other, uniquely themselves compared to canonical short stories, for example, and so it'd probably be best to call it something other than "online lit" since I honestly think very little of it can compare to so-called "literature."” ThinkingLittlesStoriesLiteratureBitsFictionExampleHumorousHonestlyCompareGenreOnlineShort StoryConsideringLit Author:Lee Klein
“In reggae I have a model of artistic excellence and possibility that is challenging and inspiring. The poem remains a demanding thing - an object to be understood and shaped into my own sense of self, the same is true of the play, the novel, the short story. Yet, for some reason, I approach these existing genres with the kind of confidence that the reggae artist approaches any song floating around out there.” KindSelfReasonPlayStoriesArtistSongChallengesMy OwnNovelPossibilityObjectsApproachModelsUnderstoodRemainsExcellenceArtisticGenreShort StoryFloatingSense Of SelfReggae Author:Kwame Dawes
“At the end of the day I see myself as a communicator. So any way that I can, any medium, any art form that I can use to communicate the truths of the Lord and scripture and my passion, then I'm going to do it. I don't know, I may do a spoken word piece one day, or I may turnaround and try to write a short story. I don't know, it just depends, but anything artistically that I can use I'll try to do it.” WritingTryingArtPassionLordOne DayCommunicateScriptureShort StoryMy PassionSpoken Word Author:Tedashii
“I always figure there are novels and short stories, and in those, I'm God. No one tells me what to do. I don't have to lose a page, or cut anything, it's just mine. Then there are other things where you're up against realities.” RealityNovelCuttingShort Story Author:Neil Gaiman
“I wanted to be a visual artist, but I realized I was more affected by what I read than by what I saw. I would go to a show at a museum and look at a painting and say, 'Oh I wish I owned that,' and that would be the end of my relationship with a painting. With a short story I would read or with an author I would discover I could be haunted. It would affect my mood and affect the way that I saw the world. I thought, wow, it would be amazing to be able to do that.” WorldArtistWishPaintingI RealizedMoodShort StoryVisual Art Author:David Sedaris
“I'm writing a novel about the Syrian war. It will be completely different from my short stories. I have to address my feelings directly because I cannot avoid the war. It's something in my soul, in my blood.” WritingDifferentWarSoulFeelingsNovelShort Story Author:Osama Alomar
“In some ways, Valiant Gentlemen grows out of Tales of the New World, my collection of short stories about explorers who lived "great" lives, but whose experience of it was in the same register as all our lives are - we feel the same extent of human emotion regardless of how exceptional our actions are: nothing is more exceptional than one's own life.” WorldActionEmotionGentlemanShort StoryExceptional Author:Sabina Murray
“I'll always be making music. I'd like to do it my whole life - although I also love words and want to write short stories. But right now, my songs are kind of my short stories.” WritingKindSongWhole LifeShort Story Author:Evan Dando
“If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.” WritingDifferentCountryNovelExcitingShort StoryWeekendVacationExile Author:Neil Gaiman
“There's definitely a feeling with a short story that it's pure story telling. You're not really worried about theme. You're not going to stay with the characters long enough to live your life with them. And you have different kinds of relationships with them.” KindLongDifferentEnoughCharacterFeelingsWorriedShort StoryDifferent KindsLive Your Life Author:Neil Gaiman
“There are characters in some short stories who exist as people, and there are other characters in different short stories who exist as purely literary constructs. You know, the young man in "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" - I probably got that right - is a literary construct, and enjoys being a literary construct. He has no life off stage, whereas the young men in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" were as near to being real human beings as I could possibly get them.” PeopleMenDifferentRealCharacterDesireNightGirlHouseEnjoyPartySecretSlaveShort StoryBeing RealDreadForbiddenBrides Author:Neil Gaiman
“I guess the freedom - poetic freedom - because the poetic part of short story form is an attempt to say something that's unsayable about one's incarcerated existence, and it's fun to come up with words to represent that condition, and it's fun to pull the tail of absurdity and rile it up, where you giggle at what you do or you get enthralled and in the short story.” FunExistencePoeticShort StoryAbsurdityGiggle Author:Hampton Fancher
“I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.” NovelTerribleHopefulShort StoryEssays Author:Samantha Hunt
“My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.” FatherLanguageNovelBrokenMy FavoriteShort Story Author:Samantha Hunt
“In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.” WritingSilenceNovelSilentShort Story Author:Samantha Hunt
“I've felt pressure to produce long fiction for as long as I've been writing fiction. There's just an incredible bias in the publishing industry toward novels and away from short stories. They're seen as D.O.A. in the marketplace, which seems nuts to me, given that various collections done smashingly and deservedly well in economic terms.” WritingLongDoneTermNovelEconomicIncrediblesVariousShort StoryPublishingBias Author:Steve Almond
“In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.” DifferentNovelShort Story Author:Alexander Payne
“I've always believed that poetry must speak of realities as least as complicated as those spoken of in prose. I've read books of poems, even single poems, which are, for me, at least the equivalent of a short story or a novel. Martin Amis, in an interview with Saul Bellow in the early eighties, quotes Bellow asking, "Why not address 'the mysterious circumstance of being', say what it's like to be alive at this time, on this planet?" This has been and still is my ambition.” BookRealitySpeakNovelCircumstancesAmbitionComplicatedMysteriousProseShort StoryAlways BelieveMy Ambition Author:Lawrence Joseph
“I've been a writer longer than I've been an actor. I wrote short stories like crazy when I was in high school and college. I worked in advertising before I moved to L.A. to pursue acting.” SchoolActingCrazyCollegeHigh SchoolMovedAdvertisingShort Story Author:Thomas Haden Church
“I don't have one thing I go back to, but we listen to a lot of music in the bus, and we always get a few songs or a few records that end up being themes for the tour. On tour I read all of George Saunders' short stories and all of Alice Munro's short stories. George Saunders is who has taught me about this question about whether or not love is possible in the contemporary world, with all of its simulations and all of its pop and divergences and all of the confusion and distraction. Whether or not contemporary reality is actually hospitable to love.” WorldRealitySongLove IsConfusionBusDistractionShort Story Author:How to Dress Well
“What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.” NovelGutsShort Story Author:Peter Orner
“A novel is like a long relationship and a short story is a brief one that lingers - it lingers powerfully and maybe more powerfully. I think that's true in a lot of cases, most long-term relationships compared to some of the briefer ones - the intensity of those brief ones that end, I think a short story is kind of like that. There's a certain level of intensity that I think is different.” ThinkingKindLongDifferentNovelShort Story Author:Peter Orner
“I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that and I'll try it again, but I'll never get it.” TryingNovelMysteryShort Story Author:Peter Orner
“I made some shorts that I'm not in. I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me. But my way into making movies has been through performing. My very first short film, I played a child and her own mother. So in some ways, to me, my great achievement so far is just that I've gotten all these other people to play the other parts. That's what makes it a real movie.” PeopleThinkingWritingChildrenRealCharacterFilmMotherAchievementMy WayPerformingShort StoryGreat AchievementShort Films Author:Miranda July
“Writing short stories was kind of like I was cheating the whole time, in some way. I went back and forth between writing the novels and sort of sneaking out to work on stories occasionally. These stories were written over the last 10 years or so, as I was taking breaks from the novels I've written.” WritingKindBreakNovelCheatingShort Story Author:Dan Chaon
“A novel requires a certain kind of world building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see. I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.” WorldKindNovelMysteryBuildingShort StoryClosure Author:Dan Chaon
“It used to be that you would go into a writing program and what you would learn was how to write a short story. You would pick up the magazines and you would be taught from the magazines how to write a short story. Nowadays student writers are learning to write novels because that market is gone, so the ones who are drawn to the form are doing it really for reasons of their own and that's really exciting.” WritingReasonNovelStudentsProgramExcitingShort Story Author:Lorin Stein
“I prefer reading novels. Short stories are too much like daggers. And now that I'm done with my collection I'm more interested in different forms of writing and other kinds of narrative art. I'm working on a screenplay. But when I was working on Eileen, I definitely felt like I was taking a piss. Like, here I am, typing on my computer, writing the "novel." It wasn't that it was insincere, but there was a kind of farcical feeling I had when I was writing.” WritingKindArtDifferentDoneFeelingsReadingNovelComputerShort StoryTypingInsincere Author:Ottessa Moshfegh
“My short stories are so character-based and they're also so private. They're like a private world in each story and I'm getting more and more interested in allowing myself to investigate the big picture about this country, and about human beings, and about the planet, and about the solar system, and about the nature of the material world in general. And I felt like I needed to move into a bigger form.” WorldCountryMovingShort StoryBig PictureSolar System Author:Ottessa Moshfegh
“I often say to my students in workshops that if they are trying to find literary inspiration, they should not go and read novels, because novels are more appropriate for series. Where as they should read short stories - that's the right format for you to be able to actually display the narrative in a film.” TryingInspirationFilmNovelStudentsShort Story Author:Abbas Kiarostami
“I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me. Alice Munro, I felt that way about from an early time. Grace Paley.” ReadingNovelGraceShort Story Author:Molly Antopol
“Raymond Carver had the quote that I loved about how he felt that a short story was the moment right before someone's life was about to fall apart. You can't really do that with a novel, but with a story you're just left hanging.” MomentsFallNovelShort StoryFalling ApartCarver Author:Molly Antopol
“I started writing the book without realizing I was writing a book. That sounds stupid, but it's true. I'd been trying and failing to make a different manuscript work, and I thought I was just taking a break by writing some short stories. I'm not a very good short story writer - the amazing compression that is required for short stories doesn't come easily to me. But anyway, I thought I'd try to write some short stories. And a structure took shape - I stumbled upon it.” WritingTryingBookDifferentRealizingBreakFailingStupidVery GoodShort StoryWriting A BookTrying And Failing Author:Ayana Mathis