Ease of Writing

It goes without saying - but will be said anyways - that the present author has been unable to construe any meaningful short story attempt and lead it to completion in some time; whether or not one gives credence to the idea of writer's block or not, short stories, by their nature, feature different difficulties that novels don't. And vice versa. While a novel requires tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of words, which in itself is a massive time commitment and headache of an edit job, being that scenes and dates and who-said-whats become overwhelming in number, writing short stories requires much less setup, background, narrative threads, characters, and the like.

What short stories do require, though, is a preponderance of ideas. If we are to use 5,000 words as a short story length, then it takes 20 short stories to come up with a similar word length to a novel, which means 20 distinct ideas, narratives, and scenarios. Coming up with this many ideas, constantly, is its own challenge.

Suffice to say, the present author has neither the talent nor perseverance to sustain the longevity of a novel, nor continually come up with ideas for short stories.