Link to original post: [drupal=883]I don't like novels[/drupal]
WARNING- Contains spoilers for several books, including The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.
I've been writing my entire life, or at least for as long as I can remember. I've gotten better at it, and my subject matter has changes as I've gotten older, but the creative spirit that drives me to create fiction is the same as it was when I was eight years old.
However, I have not always been a reader. It was not until very recently (this year, actually) that I realized the correlation between reading fiction and writing fiction. I can't believe I was so blind to it for so long, and now that I've actually taken the time to read, I've noticed a significant increase in my writing abilities. It's like I said to another writer on these boards: trying to write without reading is like trying to create music if you've never heard a song. It just won't work.
But there's something missing there. I realized that it's not necessarily that I don't like reading. I've read thousands of articles in magazines and newspapers, in fact I try to read the newspaper every day. I spend too much time on these boards (just ask my wife), and this forum is entirely dependent on reading, as is the internet as a whole. I consistently score well when it comes to reading comprehension exams. What I've come to realize is that my problem isn't with reading, it's with reading novels.
I've started eight books in the last two years, four of which were novels and four which weren't. Of the non-novel books, I finished three of them; of the novels, I only finished one. As I said, my problem is not committing my attention over hundreds of pages, I can do that with ease. My problem is with the novel as a writing form.
I write short stories. At first, I considered them to be a stepping stone towards that master of all literary forms, the novel. After all, unless your name is Stephen King, no one makes money off of short story collections. But as I've read and studied the short story form, I've come to see that I not only do I perform better with short stories, but I also love the form.
Novels have several failings to me, the most noteworthy being plotting. I admit freely that I am terrible with plots, which is one reason that I like short stories so much, because they don't really need plots. But even when I read plots, I find them boring. For example, I read Khaled Hosseini's novel [i[The Kite Runner[/i] a few months ago. It was an amazing book, and I highly recommend it to anyone. What I noticed though is that after 70 pages or so, a part of me didn't want to read it anymore. The writing was superb and exciting, and ironically that was part of the problem. I liked the characters so much, and I didn't want to keep reading because I knew that bad things were just going to keep happening to them. Eventually I told myself to stop being a pansy and finish the book. That's how novels work, bad things happen to people. So I finished it, and I'm glad I did.
But the issue is that bad things KEEP happening. That's the ultimate shortcoming of the novel format to me: You have to somehow make one character last for 300 pages, and the only way to make that happen is to keep having a series of disasters befall that character. It just get's tiring and draining after a while. I realized this shortcoming by the time I started Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Once again, at page 70, I stopped. I could already see it coming: a disaster would befall the main character, and then the next 30-40 pages would be spent watching the main character as she recovered, until the next almost implausibly worse disaster struck. This time, I didn't pick it back up.
I'm not a philistine. One of my favorite books of all time is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. If you know anything about this book, you know that it's very short; it's only about 90 pages, which places it firmly within the realm of the novella. I feel that length is perfect; it allows for moderate amounts of plot, and major character development. I've always been more interested in characters than plot, and I feel that the modern novel drowns characters under a torrent of plot.
That's why I focus on the short story. I feel like it's exciting and immediate, and it can be as short or as long as it needs to be (I've read 30-page short stories before). It's the best vehicle for character development I believe, and that's where my interests and my strengths lie anyway.
This is just me venting a little, or putting my thoughts down on paper to sort them out. But I'm also asking you readers out there to give the short story a chance. You don't hear much about them; there are no collections of short stories on the New York Times Bestseller's list (excluding, once again, Mr. Stephen King), but the writers and the collections are out there. Pick up a literary magazine or an anthology and take a chance. You may be pleasantly surprised.
WARNING- Contains spoilers for several books, including The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.
I've been writing my entire life, or at least for as long as I can remember. I've gotten better at it, and my subject matter has changes as I've gotten older, but the creative spirit that drives me to create fiction is the same as it was when I was eight years old.
However, I have not always been a reader. It was not until very recently (this year, actually) that I realized the correlation between reading fiction and writing fiction. I can't believe I was so blind to it for so long, and now that I've actually taken the time to read, I've noticed a significant increase in my writing abilities. It's like I said to another writer on these boards: trying to write without reading is like trying to create music if you've never heard a song. It just won't work.
But there's something missing there. I realized that it's not necessarily that I don't like reading. I've read thousands of articles in magazines and newspapers, in fact I try to read the newspaper every day. I spend too much time on these boards (just ask my wife), and this forum is entirely dependent on reading, as is the internet as a whole. I consistently score well when it comes to reading comprehension exams. What I've come to realize is that my problem isn't with reading, it's with reading novels.
I've started eight books in the last two years, four of which were novels and four which weren't. Of the non-novel books, I finished three of them; of the novels, I only finished one. As I said, my problem is not committing my attention over hundreds of pages, I can do that with ease. My problem is with the novel as a writing form.
I write short stories. At first, I considered them to be a stepping stone towards that master of all literary forms, the novel. After all, unless your name is Stephen King, no one makes money off of short story collections. But as I've read and studied the short story form, I've come to see that I not only do I perform better with short stories, but I also love the form.
Novels have several failings to me, the most noteworthy being plotting. I admit freely that I am terrible with plots, which is one reason that I like short stories so much, because they don't really need plots. But even when I read plots, I find them boring. For example, I read Khaled Hosseini's novel [i[The Kite Runner[/i] a few months ago. It was an amazing book, and I highly recommend it to anyone. What I noticed though is that after 70 pages or so, a part of me didn't want to read it anymore. The writing was superb and exciting, and ironically that was part of the problem. I liked the characters so much, and I didn't want to keep reading because I knew that bad things were just going to keep happening to them. Eventually I told myself to stop being a pansy and finish the book. That's how novels work, bad things happen to people. So I finished it, and I'm glad I did.
But the issue is that bad things KEEP happening. That's the ultimate shortcoming of the novel format to me: You have to somehow make one character last for 300 pages, and the only way to make that happen is to keep having a series of disasters befall that character. It just get's tiring and draining after a while. I realized this shortcoming by the time I started Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Once again, at page 70, I stopped. I could already see it coming: a disaster would befall the main character, and then the next 30-40 pages would be spent watching the main character as she recovered, until the next almost implausibly worse disaster struck. This time, I didn't pick it back up.
I'm not a philistine. One of my favorite books of all time is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. If you know anything about this book, you know that it's very short; it's only about 90 pages, which places it firmly within the realm of the novella. I feel that length is perfect; it allows for moderate amounts of plot, and major character development. I've always been more interested in characters than plot, and I feel that the modern novel drowns characters under a torrent of plot.
That's why I focus on the short story. I feel like it's exciting and immediate, and it can be as short or as long as it needs to be (I've read 30-page short stories before). It's the best vehicle for character development I believe, and that's where my interests and my strengths lie anyway.
This is just me venting a little, or putting my thoughts down on paper to sort them out. But I'm also asking you readers out there to give the short story a chance. You don't hear much about them; there are no collections of short stories on the New York Times Bestseller's list (excluding, once again, Mr. Stephen King), but the writers and the collections are out there. Pick up a literary magazine or an anthology and take a chance. You may be pleasantly surprised.
