Recently I was at Salt Lake City FanX. I was running my own booth for Big World Network and helping out the League of Utah Writers with anyone who came up with a question.
Due to a panel I was on about writing, I also answered a few questions about writing from a couple of vendors and some people enjoying the convention.
I loved it.
A question I was asked, more than once, was this. “Should I concentrate on writing short stories first, or should I focus more on novel length work?”
It got me thinking about how writers write. Some like to devote their time to cranking out a novel length book. Others like to crack out short story after short story. There are those crazy enough to do both.
So what’s the right answer?
If the writer is more comfortable focusing on the long game, concentrating on producing a novel. That’s what they should do.
If they want to write up an anthology’s worth of short stories, they should do that.
The end result will be similar. A tangible result with the writer’s name on the cover.
In the end it doesn’t matter if it’s a collection of stories, or just one.
The right answer here depends on what the writer wants to do.
Ask yourself, what do you want to do? How do you want to apply your effort?
Answer those questions.
Now go to it.
BONUS MATERIAL:
“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” Ray Bradbury
“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
―
The Wayside 