MissDemeanors Interview

Thanks so much to Tracee De Hahn for interviewing me about short fiction at her group blog MissDemeanors. I met Tracee back at Malice earlier this year and very much admire her and her work—both her fiction and her blogging too. Such fun to chat with her a bit here in Bouchercon week!

Here’s a quick exchange from the interview.

TdeH: Do you find that short fiction exercises a different part of the creative process than longer works?

AT: I do—and in fact, while I’ve heard short story writers saying they struggle to write novels, I’ve heard the same thing in the opposite direction: novelists who struggle to write a short story. While some aspiring writers might think of the short story as a stepping stone toward writing novels, they do require different approaches. Short stories involve concision and subtraction and efficiency—cutting down a paragraph to the key detail or gesture or image that suggests larger things—rather than addition, with novels obviously involving more characters, more subplots, more… everything usually, a broader scope generally of character, plot, setting, and time.

This is not to say that writers can’t do both, of course. But I do think that the best short stories can represent worlds as large as novels; they just do it in different ways.

Read the full conversation here. And look forward to seeing Tracee and all the MissDemeanors crew in Toronto soon!

 

Scroll to Top