Short stories? Novels? Something else?

Traditional trajectory for a writer in science fiction/fantasy/horror ( SF/F/H ) has been to begin honing your craft on short stories and get a solid body of those published in the professional markets. Short story writing demands a particular set of skills in creating a lean, evocative, well-structured story where every sentence is there for a reason, in the same way that every word in a poem is there for a reason. Short story writing is one of my favourite forms in which to work. With every short story I write, I continue to learn more about what makes a good piece of fiction. My perceptions of the process of writing fiction are constantly changing. Nowadays I'm talking about stories in terms of shape, movement and architecture, in ways that are probably baffling to some of my students when I teach.

For those who are novel-minded, and/or those who are hoping to make a living off writing fiction, short story writing alone will not do it. Novels increase your audience -- more people read novels than read single author short story collections. Novels also bring bigger advances. The theory has been that having short stories out in the world means that your novel manuscript has a better chance of making it through an editor's slush pile and actually ending up on her desk. I don't know whether that's true. An unsolicited story still has to stand on its own merits. Even if it were ever true, things are changing. Things have a habit of doing that. Increasingly, there are writers in F/SF/H who get novels published first. There are also writers who don't write short stories at all, or hardly ever. Octavia E. Butler wrote few enough short stories that they are all collected in one volume, Blood Child and Other Stories. There are also writers who write primarily shorter form fiction; among them Kelly Link, Eleanor Arnason, Andy Duncan and Jim Kelly. I do both. I began with short stories, and continue to write and submit them. I find that some of my story ideas need the shorter length to work through properly, and some need the longer length. When I get an idea, I know immediately whether it should be a short story or a novel. I don't have the same Spidey-sense for mid-length novellas and novelettes, because I've never written them. Or maybe it's the other way around. Eleanor Arnason and Ellen Klages are two authors whose novellas and novelettes I admire. I've notified my lizard back-brain that writing at the middle lengths is another set of competencies I want to take on. I've found that when I give the lizard brain a notion to run with, it quite cheerfully does, usually resulting in something more distaff and interesting than I could have come up with if I'd mulled it over at a conscious level.