January posting meme: short and long fiction

pendrecarc asked: How do you approach writing short and long fiction differently, if at all?

Well, that is an interesting question that I am not at all sure I'm qualified to answer. Because, when I consider it, I realize that I have written very little short original fiction, and no novel-length fanfic. So I'm comparing grapes and bananas, to reach for a more appropriate fruity image, since right up front there's a discrepancy between a story where you start out knowing the setting and characters and a story where you have to make all that up yourself.

However, to some extent writing is writing, so: yes, I suppose I think about them differently. I am not an outliner in general, but when writing a novel I have to have some idea of shape and storyline before starting, and I usually know how it ends if not every major plot point along the way. And there's a lot more research, and many more characters and settings that have to be thought about. It's just all bigger and more complicated. To choose as a metaphor something I'm pretty much ignorant about: it's not just that a marathon is longer than a sprint race, but that it requires strategy and pacing rather than simply raw talent. Or: a full-length ballet needs a story and a structure, whereas a ten-minute dance piece… also needs a story, but it can be a story wrapped around one lovely image that strikes quickly to the hearts of the audience, whereas if you did that over and over for an hour they'd get bored.

And of course both the marathon and the ballet require strength and endurance, of the type I don't have physically but apparently do, in sufficiency, for novel-writing. That's probably the biggest difference, frankly: for long fiction you have to keep slogging away, and there's always a point where desire and inspiration slows, and somehow you just have to get through it. (I've had that happen in short fiction, too, but at least then it's not too far to the end.) It's a commitment; short stories can be more like a fling. Which doesn't make them less a form of art, or essentially easier to produce. The oratorio or the opera, versus the madrigal or the aria.

I'd like to explore this further, but I think comparisons do start to break down when I think about character or plot development, because of the aforementioned original/fanfic difference. There are also lots of things that are the same no matter the type or the length - pendrecarc mentioned in her question the easy and difficult parts I talked about before, and no, those don't change depending on what I'm writing. Longer just means more of whatever it is.