Difference between short story and novel

[lobelia321]

Another difference (further to my previous post)

A novel is a novel.

All of my fanfic has been in the form of a short story.

(Exception: Yes, there is the WIP but that is unfinished. Yes, there are the two monsters of long-long-long fic but they are short stories that went out of control not things that were planned as novels.)

I now know how to construct a short story. I know what a good beginning is; I feel intuitively when I've hit the ending; I know how to move things along, stick within one pov, switch povs judiciously and in regular patterns (if I do), reduce personae dramatis, concentrate action within a prescribed time and setting.

In the novel, it seems as if all my experience of the past five years just flew out the window.

It is true that the nano format did not allow for any great planning of structure. As a result, I wrote madly every day, constructing the kind of 'and then' story I don't actually much like. I piled event upon event. I switched pov frequently. I had three sets of main characters and settings to follow. I had only a vague idea of how these strands were to hook up in the end. I just had no experience of constructing something so big and complex.

To me, this is a fundamental difference between the form of the short story and the form of the novel. It's not a fundamental difference between the genre of slash/fanfic and the genre of origfic.

(And yes, I am silly enough to continue to be amused by referring to the entirety of the Borders bookshelves and the Amazon website and the whole literary canon of the world as origfic.)



I'm in a good mood!! More about that in another post.