FvB -- FWIW, I think it can be useful to make a distinction between "amount of narrative" (ie., actual storytelling: plot turns and complications, etc) and "how complete or full a work feels." Movies often seem to use up an amount of narrative that's about the equivalent of a very long story or a short novel -- that's about what fills up a 90-120 minute space. "The Maltese Falcoln"'s a good indicator because the movie is so close, in terms of action, to the novel -- wasn't Huston said to have thought, what the hell, I'll just put the book on film?

But as experiences movies can feel remarkably complete, ("can"!), because of everything else that package tends to contain: music, visuals, set design, performances, etc. Plus there are all those personalities and minds kicking in, where a book just has the one brain at work, generally.

So a 90-minute session with a movie is usually a "fuller"-feeling thing than a 90-minute experience with a piece of prose fiction. Or at least many people seem to find this to be the case.

And maybe there's another reason why many people find long stories or short novels to feel skimpy. 90-120 minutes of a movie seems to be (exceptions allowed for, but let's admit they're rare) about what's humanly possible in terms of control -- much longer than that and most film artists start to lose their command over their projects. And maybe we sense that. Maybe watching a feature movie, we feel we're being given the whole deal, people working at their limits. And maybe that feeling parallels one of the feelings we get when reading a novel, which is that this thing here is about all a human being can do. Maybe a 100 page story, on the other hand, makes some brain cell say something like, "well, that's all very nice and nicely-turned and I'm glad the artist had a nice time, but I want to see some more EFFORT, dammit."

I suspect one of the age-related taste-changes I'm experiencing is that, with age, I'm more prone to appreciate ease, comfort, working within limits, having a nice time. And I like thinking in terms of pleasure, and people working for and from pleasure. Maybe as a younger dude I wanted more kapow, more stress. I had more energy, and I wanted to see something dynamic, explosive, category-busting, new, different, immense. These days, what people do from love and for pleasure moves me most deeply.

The other thing you've got my motor going about here is the whole "short story" thing. It's off-topic a bit but I'm going to indulge myself anyway.

For years I struggled with the "short story" thing. I loved the idea of short stories, and there were some I adored. But mostly -- pee-yew. Mostly I couldn't believe how bad I found them. Why should that be?

Well, partly it's because so many have been written -- the lower the barrier to entry, the more crap is likely to be created, and short stories are certainly much less demanding of time and effort to create than novels are, thus scads of lousy short stories. But even many of the supposed "greats" turned me off, as did many many of the contempo world's supposed best short story writers.

I finally hit on a way of adjusting my thinking that left me calmer and happier. It's to make a distinction between "short fiction" and "short stories." The literary (and especially the contempo-literary) short story is a very specific (and to my mind peculiar) kind of thing, with an accepted literary history and a specific set of contempo techniques: Poe-Chekhov-Mansfield-Hemingway-Cheever-Carver, basically. I like a certain amount of this work, but it's a very narrow view of short fiction. It's like the story of art as told by a modernist -- big surprise, it all leads to modernism, and to contemporary absurdities, and to a very specific set of ways that a present-day "short story" has to be conceived of and made. (I've taken enough how-to-write-a-short-story classes to be familiar with the routine.)

I find it helpful to think instead of "short fiction" -- ie., fiction that just happens to be shorter than novella length. Short fiction, conceived of in that sense, is just a matter of length. Nothing in terms of form or technique is being prescribed -- the writer's free to do what he pleases, the reader to choose (and enjoy) as he pleases. As it turns out, there's a lot of short fiction I get a big kick out of -- and while I'd certainly love to see more people write short fiction, if I never read another officially-sanctioned "short story" in this lifetime, that'll be fine with me.

I looked into this some, and what I finally concluded was that the official "short story" is quite a distant, and often thin-blooded, relative of the original short stories, which were trashy. American short stories originated with Poe -- horror, mystery, glitzy trash, basically. In England, short stories grew out of, believe it or not, journalism. Back in the 1700s, journalists would cover Parliament and politics (and gossip), but they had to protect themselves -- they couldn't use real names. So they'd invent names, and then tell the stories. With invented names, they started screwing around with the content of the stories, and eventually fictional, short stories evolved out of that. Kinda like the way novels grew out of pretend-real accounts -- the way Defoe pretended that Moll Flanders and Crusoe were "real" accounts. Journalism and fiction all mixed up, and rather downmarket -- much more like a cross between B-movies and the E! network than like today's hush-hush lit world.

That high-falutin', over-formal form "the short story" actually has its roots in trash and garbage -- sensational literature and journalism. Then it got a little conscious of itself; then it got very conscious of itself; then it became an artform; and these days it's rigid and largely dead, IMHO. Doesn't interest me much, anyway. Short fiction, on the other hand, still lives -- mystery stories, porno, horror (and a handful of lit stories too). And largely, as far as I'm concerned, because its connection to its roots (and to what many, many people enjoy and love about reading) is far more direct. The official-lit-world people have gotten so fixated on the "art" and on appreciating art and catering to that kind of appreciation that they've killed the form. They've cut it off from its roots.

Hey, still free-associating: did you ever run across the (to me interesting and useful) notion that what a screenplay is is pure storytelling? It's all action, behavior and story, with none of the frills or decor -- pure storytelling engineering. On the one hand, that means that screenplays aren't complete works of art. Someone has to complete them, to flesh them out by acting and directing and photographing. On the other hand, it does mean that there's a lot to be learned from reading and studying screenplays -- at least if you're interested in storytelling. Even mediocre screenplays are often better-engineered as storytelling than a lot of novels are. They've gotta be, because that's all they're selling, where a book-writer can whip it past, or try to, with the writin'.

All IMHO, of course...

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on April 15, 2004 1:24 PM

>>How do you guys find that, say, watching a movie compares to reading a novel?

I think the closest analog to novel-reading in mass media isn't movies but TV series, especially now that DVDs have made it easy to buy an entire season of a show at a time.

I discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel on DVD and watching a season of either of those shows is just as satisfying (if not more) as any contemporary novel I've read in the past few years.

Posted by: Bryan on April 15, 2004 4:32 PM

I recommend Patricia Highsmith's "Little Tales of Misogyny" in her Selected Stories; none over three pages long. It starts with one of my favorite opening lines (from memory, but I think it's right):

"A hopeful young man asked a father for his daughter's hand, so he gave it to him in a box."

Posted by: Brian on April 15, 2004 6:11 PM

Bryan -- That's a great point, thanks. I watched the first season of "The Sopranos" a few years back all in a rush (over the course of about a week, rather than as a "tv series") and was struck by how much like reading a good solid novel the experience was. One thing that most movies don't deliver that some novels do (and, as you point out, some TV projects do) is that sense of really having spent some time living among a bunch of characters -- that sense of a life lived (as opposed to a dramatic impulse enacted) -- seems to be hard to convey in a movie of conventional length. But ongoing TV series have their prob too, which is that they're open-ended, so that final bit of shaping and rounding that a novel delivers doesn't often come across -- finally, most of them turn into soap operas. (Not that I have anything against that.) The reason the first series of "The Sopranos" worked so much like a novel for me was that it did have a big, rounded-off shape. It was so satisfying that I've never gone back to watch the series again -- it felt complete to me. Do the "Buffy" DVDs supply that rounded-off-and-complete feeling, do you find?

Brian -- Right on to that, and thanks for pointing those stories out. I'm a Highsmith nut, and adore her stories. I remember reading 'em and thinking, Jesus, "why didn't The New Yorker publish these rather than the wimpy beige stuff they usually did?" If they had, they'd have turned a lot of readers on rather than off short fiction, I bet.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on April 16, 2004 10:28 AM

Poems fit this bill admirably. Yet no one reads them. I reluctantly conclude that people prefer length after all.

Posted by: Aaron Haspel on April 16, 2004 1:08 PM

Michael, well if I have an evening to spend on a novel I generally finish it, so I'm not feeling imposed on by the amount of time the novelist requires me to spend on it. When I have to travel a long way I go out of my way to find books that are slow going. I read fast.

Having said that, War and Peace took me about a month, in amongst other stuff. But it wasn't demanding, since I wanted to spend the time in those books and of course in a book it's easier to mark your page, put it down and then pick it up again and fit in around life's demands. Even videos aren't like that. You need a TV and a video, you have to stay put instead of wandering around with a book in one hand. I enjoy the LOTR movies, but sitting down to watch one is definitely much more demanding than sitting down with A Suitable Boy.

But I've never seen a short movie that's half way as good as the LOTR series, or Stickmen, or Memento.

Posted by: Tracy on April 17, 2004 8:23 AM

>>The reason the first series of "The Sopranos" worked so much like a novel for me was that it did have a big, rounded-off shape...Do the "Buffy" DVDs supply that rounded-off-and-complete feeling, do you find?

Definitely. Joss Whedon (the creator, head writer, and executive producer) is known to plot his story arcs far in advance, so each season has a beginning, middle, and end. But since each season is 22 episodes he's got some wiggle room to play with, so there are "self-contained" episodes that are a little digressive from the main plot. (Whereas a show like "The Sopranos" is more tightly plotted since an HBO season consists of about a dozen episodes.)

Posted by: Bryan on April 17, 2004 1:29 PM






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