Mind, Machines & Evolution by James P. Hogan

Author:James P. Hogan [Hogan, James P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

How Long Should a Piece of String Be?

Aspiring writers often ask me if they should begin with short stories and work up from there toward full-length novels. I think this is the wrong question to ask. How long a work needs to be depends on what the writer wants to say. Some crushingly tedious books have resulted from padding out to hundreds of pages the single idea that ought to have been a short story; and many shorter works have suffered from jumbling together too many interesting thoughts which deserved the space to be developed. Hence I don’t care very much what lengths are supposed to constitute a short story, a novella, a short novel, and so on. Whatever best expresses what I have to say is the length it needs to be, and others can worry about what category it belongs to. Writing shouldn’t be a Procrustean bed that ideas are cut or stretched to fit.

“Assassin” was the first thing I wrote that came out as a short story (or novella, or whatever). That was in late 1977, after I’d written three novels – which answers the question about having to write short fiction first. Judy-Lynn Del Rey called from New York soon after we’d arrived in the U.S. to say that she was putting together the fourth in her Stellar series of anthologies, and had reserved a slot in it for me. “So write something, Hogan,” she ordered. Reflecting back, I don’t doubt that this was her way of making sure I kept up the writing habit, before excuses about having just arrived in a new country and started a new job had any time to take root. One of the things that made Judy-Lynn such a good editor was that she never allowed authors to get lazy by deciding to take breaks between books – which can easily turn into those “blocks” you hear about that last for years. As soon as she received the manuscript for that latest novel, she’d be on the phone demanding an outline for the next. It didn’t matter if the outline was half-baked and full of unresolved problems, or even if we ended up abandoning it completely – the wheels that would eventually produce the next story had been kept turning.

The problem with “Assassin”, though, was that I had just moved to a new country and begun a new and very demanding job with Digital Equipment – and on top of that had blown all my spare time by getting involved in restoring the house. So I wrote it by going to the office three hours early every morning and using my secretary’s typewriter. As with many first attempts at shorter fiction, it was too wordy and rambling. The version included here – reread eight years later – has been pruned mercilessly.

I think this tells us something about writing technique. The purpose of a first draft is to capture every thought and get it down on paper before it evaporates. The

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