Learning to Write Fiction
“You can learn more about writing from writing short stories than you can from writing novels.”
Charles Baxter, in an interview in the Missouri Review, Spring 2008
In this interview by Marsha McSpadden and and Trevor Gore, Baxter goes on to explain that in a short story, it’s easier to find and fix what went wrong. In a novel, he says, you can go hundreds of pages before finding the flaw. “I spent years of my life writing bad novels that were never published because I didn’t realize the mistakes I was making. I only really figured out how to do it by writing stories.”
What about you? If you write short fiction, to you view it as a springboard to writing a novel? If you’re working on a novel, have you previously written short fiction? If you write both, which came to fruition first?