Our attention spans are being whittled to nonexistence by an increasingly impatient feedback loop, with social media, the internet, and AI competing to devour our attentional capacity. Yet when leafing through recent editions of the annual Best American Short Stories anthology, you’ll notice that a lot of those stories aren’t that short. In fact, they’re kind of long; the 2024 edition featured twenty stories, and only one was under four thousand words.
Like many of us, the MFA students I teach tend to be more comfortable writing stories under three thousand words, but many of my favorite short stories, by writers like Deborah Eisenberg and Adam Johnson, are far longer than that. My own recent stories, too, tend to be longer—six out of my last seven short stories clocked in at over six thousand words.
Still, writers who are new to the form understandably tend to avoid that larger canvas, which can feel daunting. Maybe for good reason, too. Longer stories can easily fall apart—they can end up feeling meandering, thematically incoherent, or confusing. But a few basic processes and craft suggestions can make longer stories easier to pull off. Also, they’re fun to write, accessing the most satisfying aspects of novel writing (deeper characters with real arcs, more complex relationships) without being burdened by a novel’s vastness. {read}