Old Stories About Stories
A modest corrective to one narrative about how to break into publishing
It’s that time again—mists, mellow fruitfulness, sweaters, my ongoing attempt to zero in on what makes a book ‘spooky’ in my sight and fit for the season. (It’s not purely horror—or not all horror—there’s playfulness mixed with the menace and discomfort, a sense of childhood and time and age and transformation, of dream and nightmare… It’s A Night in the Lonesome October and Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Westing Game and Boneshaker and Peace and maybe it’s Haunting of Hill House and maybe it’s Izumi Kyoka, but for some reason even though It has such far-reaching overlap with the material in question it doesn’t seem quite right, and what’s up with that?)
On Monday I got back from Viable Paradise, the one-week intensive writer’s workshop on Martha’s Vineyard where I teach most years. I love VP—it’s an interval of intense conversation, of carving out time to think deeply not just about how to write but how to live while and through writing. And every year the workshop changes. Each student brings their own world along, and the instructors shift to compensate. Over time, though, I’ve seen some consistent themes emerge, and while career advice is slippery and situational at best, I’d like to offer one small corrective to anyone out there on the internet looking to write science fiction and fantasy novels for traditional publishing channels:
You don’t have to write short fiction if you don’t want to.
Back in the 2000s, when I was reading Livejournal posts about how to build a career writing science fiction (to the extent it was possible, to the extent such a thing as a ‘career in writing science fiction’ existed at all), I got the sense that writers obeyed a relatively strict progression, a cursus honorum if you will. You published short stories first, wherever you could sell them. Then you published short stories in markets that paid pro rates. Then you queried agents with a novel project, mentioning your high-profile short fiction sales. Then you published novels.
Some early-career writers in 2023 are still hearing a version of this cursus honorum story. Which is odd, because it wasn’t true even when I internalized it. In consultation with writers who’ve been on the block a lot longer than I have, it seems it hadn’t been true for at least 20 years when I first heard it.
Everyone I’ve spoken with agrees that the cursus honorum was true, more or less, once upon a time. In the middle of the twentieth century, in the USA, there were many science fiction and fantasy magazines with monthly distribution of fifty thousand copies or more—and during this time there were perhaps fifty or sixty science fiction novels published in a year in mass market paperback. Those magazines represented a lot of slots for short fiction, and a wide reader base who might follow a promising new voice to future projects. By contrast, a new writer trying to break in as a novelist would be competing for very few slots with writers who had already established a wide readership.
The last decade or so has been a second golden age of short science fiction publishing in many respects. There are more venues publishing more work than there were in the early 2000s (after the downfall of many old magazines, and before the rise of the online market), and they’re publishing a wider array of voices, and paying pro rates. But slush piles are huge (were huge even before the wave of AI-generated submissions), and wait times are long, and slots for debut short fiction are limited—how many new writers per month per market?—and at 8c/word, a pro rate sale for a 3000-word piece amounts to US$240. Since many venues prohibit simultaneous submissions, early-career writers can find themselves waiting months, or as long as a year, to receive a form rejection on a piece.
If what you want is to write novels, and you believe that you need at least a couple high profile short fiction sales to flush out your query letter—the math daunts.
By contrast—I can’t find the precise number of SFF novels traditionally published last year in the US in the time I have to write this essay, but I’ve heard 800 as a round figure. That’s a lot more than 50! And I think 800 is a substantial underestimate if you consider YA, MG, and romance-with-fantasy-characteristics, without mention of independent publishing. Many (most?) agents allow simultaneous submission, which makes the cold-calling phase of one’s career more humane, and while I can’t imagine a high-profile short fiction sale hurting a query letter, it’s helpful to remember that the ‘brief bio’ part of the query comes after the part where you talk about your book—by which point you hope to have hooked the agent already. And, once you go out on submission, publishers tend to like new voices, because every new name on a book is like a wrapped present under the Christmas tree—it could be the name of a future megabestseller. The possibility entices.
Am I saying that you shouldn’t write short fiction, if you want to publish SFF novels? Absolutely not. Short SFF is a tremendous, valuable, lively, profound form. It can be a playground. It can also be a dojo, where you develop skills that will transfer to the novel—you can experiment with and practice voice, formal invention, and, vitally, endings. And, if you break in as a novelist, you will find it useful to be able to write short fiction—if you find yourself solicited for an anthology, or if you want to write interstitial material, or throw an off-speed pitch. And you can iterate much faster on 3,000 word projects than you can on 100,000 word projects.
Writing high-profile short fiction can absolutely help you get an agent, and get a book deal, and even get film & TV attention. I know many authors who have built successful careers that way. I also know many writers who barely published short fiction—or didn’t publish it at all— before they found an agent, or made their first novel sale, and those writers are doing great.
If you’re a natural short story writer, I don’t mean to discourage you from writing and publishing short stories. Some people are drawn to short fiction, as readers and as writers. Some people write it quickly and with great facility. Some people adore the clockwork focus, the weight borne by every single word. If you’re one of those people—if writing short SF gives you a feeling of joy and power and catharsis, if you love writing something in a week and sending it off and writing something else next week, if you love the inarguable landing of a short story—by all means, go to, and all blessings on your career.
But some people are drawn to novels. I’m one of those people. I feel the most at home when I’m thinking long form. I love development and discovery. I love the kind of feints and setups for which short fiction lacks room. I love a book that gets beyond the reader, a book in which a reader goes wandering. I love the domino cascade of a fifth act with four hundred pages behind it. I love capacious, all-embracing stories, whatever their length. And if you want to write novels, sooner or later you have to write ‘em. You need to find your marathon pace.
When I internalized the cursus honorum, I devoted a lot of time and energy to writing and sending out short stories. I learned about form and concision, I learned about endings, I learned about rejection, I learned about no-lick envelopes and the joy of a fresh stamp. But after a couple years I found that joy curdling. I sat down to write, thinking, “well, when can I do what I really want to do?”
That’s the trap.
There are many roads, and nobody, least of all me, knows where they lead. By all means experiment, develop your skills, try things out. But in the end: write what you want to write. Write what commands you, daunts you, entices you. Life is too short to do anything else.
Updates:
I’m most of the way done with page proofs for Wicked Problems! It’s a good one, y’all.
Over on Tor.com, Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth continue their re-read and commentary of Last Exit.
More exciting news to come—but nothing I can talk about quite yet. Argh.
Take care of yourselves, friends. Happy reading.
Thank you for the very helpful pro advice!