The Worst Advice Lawrence Block Ever Gave Me

Lawrence Block, he's a friend of mine. Well, in a totally fictional and fangirl way, he's a friend of mine. I've read his Tanner and Burglar books for years. And Lawrence gives me great writing advice, too, ever since that day many years ago when I first bought a copy of LB's book Writing the Novel:
from Plot to Print.

But in that book Lawrence gave me a major bum steer that I am only now getting over. You see, in that book he recommends strongly that the novice writer NOT bother with writing short stories. The market for short stories, he declares, is too small and too low-paying now for that to be very practical. He recommended that the new writer start out by writing a novel.

Is that the way Lawrence Block learned to write? No, he admits. He wrote short stories for years before he felt ready to tackle the novel.

Many other writers of Lawrence Block's generation learned the same way. At the time, there were a great many short story magazines, called 'pulps', in a wide variety of genres--- sci-fi, mystery, westerns, romance, adventure--- and they were available on every news stand. (Yes, there used to be these things called 'news stands' that sold newspapers and magazines. A newspaper was kind of like the evening news broadcast, only written down and printed on paper.)

At the time LB wrote the book, there were only a tiny handful of short story magazines left and they paid the same as they did a couple of decades back, even though the dollar had declined greatly over that time.

I will agree with LB that at that time there was no real financial incentive for the novice writer to write short stories. But the thing is, the reason most writers started with short stories wasn't a money thing. They did it for the same reason most of us learned to walk before we learned to drive a car or fly an airplane.

A novel is a complicated thing, and you can spend months on it before you discover you are driving it into a dead end. While a short story can be simple enough that you can hold the whole thing in your mind.

A shorter work is just more possible for the novice writer to do, and to do well. Short stories, being short, are also easier to revise and improve.

Lawrence Block said that you can write a novel in the same time it would take to write twenty short stories, and that the odds are better for selling that novel than for selling the twenty short stories.

But what if your writing, at first, is not good enough to sell at all? You will end up with seven utterly hopeless short stories, seven that are a bit better, and then you will have a few with potential. While if you had started with a novel right off the bat, you will have an utterly hopeless novel.

The changing world of publishing has made short stories more worth doing. No, there has been no revival of the pulps as a paying market for short fiction. But now, self-publishing is easier, cheaper and more respected. There is also the internet. There are e-zines to submit to, and web sites where would-be authors can post their stories, and the possibility of publishing your short story, in installments, on your blog. You can also turn a short story into an e-book and sell it or give it away.

All of these things can build you up as a writer. You will learn your craft, and you will get feedback. A tiny amount of that feedback will be things that are actually useful to you.

I have decided, for myself, that what I need to be doing now is to work on short fiction. Perhaps because of my Asperger Syndrome, which has some symptoms similar to ADHD, the complexities of a full novel are beyond me right now. But if I can get the short story right--- well, story stories have been known to become novels, as in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, or Hugh Howey's Wool. This just might lead to something.