The highlight of Wordstock for me so far was this afternoon's Why Write Short? panel with Aimee Bender, Anthony Doerr, and David Vann. All three writers were enthusiastic and seemed thrilled to be there; there was a great give and take in different approaches to writing, and the whole thing was expertly moderated by Tin House's Meg Storey.
Storey kicked things off by asking the obvious: Other than length, what's the difference between short stories, novellas, and novels?
Vann—whom I liked so much at this panel that I saw him read later that afternoon—jumped in first by talking about structural difference between short stories and novellas, how a novella can have two "crisis points" whereas a short story usually just has one. He used as an example Katherine Anne Porter's Noon Wine, about a character who kills someone else (crisis one) and then himself (crisis two).
Doerr noted that "anytime you try to make any rules about fiction writing, you’ll invariably find examples that break those rules.” The key difference between short stories and novels is ability to read it in one sitting vs. over a period of time—so many things can happen while one reads a novel, whereas a short story is a more compressed experience.
And Aimee Bender, god love her, says, basically, that length is the difference. "There has to be movement of some sort within your story, whatever the form." But Vann came right back at her: "I think there tends to be a higher cohesion of language and a smaller cast of characters in a short story or novella. In addition to length, I think formally they’re different."
This initial exchange set the tone of the rest of the conversation, a very friendly give and take in which the authors weighed different ideas, politely disagreed, and laughed a lot. It was fun. More after the jump!