A modern redemption
but useless question in writing-craft interviews asks how budding fiction writers distinguish between ideas for short stories and those for novels. In the early stages, how can a writer know whether a character needs 8,000 words or 800,000? The answer is that there is no answer. Plenty of novels—and this is not an insult—could be compressed into stories; plenty of stories have the intellectual and emotional heft of novels. Some novels start their lives as stories, then refuse to stop
