Is Your Novel Meant to be a Short Story?
John McManus on the necessity of the least efficient process possible
I’m trying to resist the temptation to take the novel I’m close to completing after fifteen years, cut 325 of its 350 pages, and turn it into a short story. We’ll see. I’ve got four more days.
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A Short Story Story
by John McManus *
*First published in The Writer in the World on May 9, 2016
The other day I heard from a friend who recently became a fiction editor at a journal I admire. Do you have an unpublished story you can show me, she asked? A smart writer would be able to say yes, because—especially after having had to say no on similar occasions in the past—a smart writer would keep a stocked arsenal of short stories lying around for times like this.
But I don’t learn from my mistakes. My new collection had used everything up, and since its completion last year I’d been working on a novel. How long did I have to throw something together? One week, said my friend. I recalled that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in six days. He spent the whole time high on cocaine, a drug I’ve put behind me; on the other hand, Jekyll and Hyde is a whole novella, whereas three thousand words would suffice for my purposes.
I opened a file containing what I’d believed was a list of story ideas. If/then, read one item on the list, in full. Shard, said another. CBCPCISH, offered a third. I vaguely recalled this act of abbreviation. It was inspired by the nausea I got just to imagine anyone else ever laying eyes on my notes. Let me digress to talk about archives. These days writers are always selling or donating their archives to libraries and foundations, as if a willingness to let other people view their notes and first drafts is a normal human feeling. It’s not. When the time comes, I’ll be donating my archive to a bonfire.
Since the notes weren’t much help, I tried the junkyard. That’s the area of my hard drive where failed novels live. I’ve written something like twenty of them, which might feel like a monumental waste if I hadn’t been able to repurpose so many of as short stories. Generally my favorite stories I’ve written are the ones where I’ve pruned at least ninety percent of a text away. Only two stories from my second collection can I bear rereading: “Cades Cove,” which began as a novella and wound up two pages, and “Mr. Gas,” which was a 350-page novel that seemed more worthy of existence once I got it down below twenty pages. I’m confident no copies exist of the originals. If any did, I would delete them, then hire a computer expert to eliminate any remaining digital traces, then send unsolicited rejection letters to all worldwide institutions that collect archives.
My method of story-writing probably qualifies as the most inefficient manner ever devised for constructing anything. Still, it works. Therefore, I’m trying to resist the temptation to take the novel I’m close to completing after fifteen years, cut 325 of its 350 pages, and turn it into a short story. We’ll see. I’ve got four more days.
John McManus is the author of five books of fiction and the co-founder of Ordain, a decentralized marketplace for narrative art. His new collection, Famous Children, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2027. His previous books include the story collections Fox Tooth Heart, Born on a Train, and Stop Breakin Down and the novel Bitter Milk. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, Tin House, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, and Electric Literature, among many other journals. He is the recipient of the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Literature Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Fulbright Scholar award in South Africa, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers' New Writing Award.
McManus earned his MFA in fiction and screenwriting from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. He teaches in Old Dominion University’s MFA program in Norfolk, Virginia, where he is co-directing the school’s 49th Annual Literary Festival. He divides his time between there and New York, where he lives with his husband, the playwright and theater director Kareem Fahmy. More at JohnMcManus.net
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I think a majority of the novels I read would be killer short stories.