Criticizing long fiction. How is it different from short?
I recently asked about criticism regarding short pieces of fiction. What about longer works like novels? Surely no one can sit down and agonize over individual word choices in a larger work the way they can over something as short as three to four pages. So how do you approach longer works? What else do you do differently? What are your main concerns when reading over it to give feedback? Is size alone the only difference in such approaches?
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1 answer
Is size alone the only difference in such approaches?
My answer:
It's not about size, it's about a sense of scale.
Short pieces are like snacks; easily eaten and digested. A bad one will leave a bad aftertaste in your mouth; a good one will leave you wanting for more, or, if it's really good, make you wonder at the writer's ability that condensed so many ingredients in such a small thing.
Novels, though, are a different thing. Unless you are an editor, you won't read a novel a day, and after all they are not supposed to be consumed on the spot. Hence, novels have a larger scale; they give you more time to breathe, and they need more time to breathe, also.
In a short story the author must set things straight in a short time. Characters must be explained, stakes must be clarified, something resembling an arc must rise and fall in a given set of words.
In a novel you have whole chapters to explore the very same concepts and - possibly - much more.
Surely no one can sit down and agonize over individual word choices in a larger work the way they can over something as short as three to four pages.
To be honest, I wouldn't fret over individual word choices in any case. But it makes kind of sense for a short story, since your words are limited. Word-choice sets the tone; if your upper limit is 1000 words, you've got to be careful with them (consider poetry an even more extreme example).
But then again, being so sharply focused on word choice in a novel doesn't make sense and is dangerously close to nitpicking. Not because novelists don't need to worry about style or lexicon (they do, as all writers) but because there is a bigger picture to look at.
A single page of a novel, or a single chapter, may be faulty or badly written. But setting aside particular cases (e.g., you don't want your prologue to be that chapter) the overall novel can still be good. A bigger, more articulate structure will tolerate some faults. In other words, a novel is more than the sum of its chapters, and more than the sum of each individual scene.
So, when inspecting a novel, I'd keep an eye on the writing, of course, but I'd be more lenient. Things like character arcs, subplots, worldbuilding, branching narratives, theme and so on all can take advantage of a novels longer span.
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