A Letter on the Short Story vs. the Novelettes
A Letter on the Short Story vs. the Novelettes
Short stories are what I like, perhaps not the best though, do did I care all that much for long stories, each seem to have its issues with me: don’t get me wrong, I read them, and if you seen me walking around, I may have a fat book. Let me explain. I think the best read for me is novelettes (15,000 to 20,000 words). The reason being, short stories are excellent and you can read them in the clap of an eye, but they only provide one incident, and the beginning of a crisis, we lose the impact, because of a short plot, the big climax is swallowed up to a make it a smaller one; whereas, the novelette (as in the story:” The Rape of Angelina,” or “Cold Kindness,”) everything is there. What is the reader looking for one must ask? A connecting of events skillfully interwoven together into a pattern those that will hold his/her interest and make one spellbound. In the short story “The Seventy Born Son,” it accomplished almost all this in it short story form, but not quite, it needs something to get to the spellbound stage, as does the often read “Elephant’s in the Sky,” again it needs something quick to put an everlasting stamp in the back of your mind. We see a disaster in the makings, but we don’t know where it came form, step by step, or after the crisis what really happened. So you see, the novelette provides all this. We can go on to longer stories, but I get tired, often forget what he did, and why this and that, and get confused, if not bored, and end up falling to sleep, having to figure out all the people involved all over again, and the connection with them; it is too much of a task orientated read, like Faulkner (and I have all his books, and read them, but when I read them, I got to stop my life, or reread them over a few more times). In books of length and many characters, I even have to take a pen and paper and make a roadmap of everything, it’s too involved, and I don’t need to know when he picks his nose, only if it falls off his head. But we are all different are we not, that is why we have different mode cars, I suppose.
Short stories are what I like, perhaps not the best though, do did I care all that much for long stories, each seem to have its issues with me: don’t get me wrong, I read them, and if you seen me walking around, I may have a fat book. Let me explain. I think the best read for me is novelettes (15,000 to 20,000 words). The reason being, short stories are excellent and you can read them in the clap of an eye, but they only provide one incident, and the beginning of a crisis, we lose the impact, because of a short plot, the big climax is swallowed up to a make it a smaller one; whereas, the novelette (as in the story:” The Rape of Angelina,” or “Cold Kindness,”) everything is there. What is the reader looking for one must ask? A connecting of events skillfully interwoven together into a pattern those that will hold his/her interest and make one spellbound. In the short story “The Seventy Born Son,” it accomplished almost all this in it short story form, but not quite, it needs something to get to the spellbound stage, as does the often read “Elephant’s in the Sky,” again it needs something quick to put an everlasting stamp in the back of your mind. We see a disaster in the makings, but we don’t know where it came form, step by step, or after the crisis what really happened. So you see, the novelette provides all this. We can go on to longer stories, but I get tired, often forget what he did, and why this and that, and get confused, if not bored, and end up falling to sleep, having to figure out all the people involved all over again, and the connection with them; it is too much of a task orientated read, like Faulkner (and I have all his books, and read them, but when I read them, I got to stop my life, or reread them over a few more times). In books of length and many characters, I even have to take a pen and paper and make a roadmap of everything, it’s too involved, and I don’t need to know when he picks his nose, only if it falls off his head. But we are all different are we not, that is why we have different mode cars, I suppose.
posted by Dennis and Rosa Siluk at 10:12 AM
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