How can you tell if a particular story idea is more suitable for a short story or a novel? People ask me this all the time, and I used to have a pretty good answer.

I used to say that a short story feels like something that’s confined to a particular moment or set of circumstances, involving a smaller number of characters and not much in the way of subplots, with a situation that’s introduced early on and reaches some kind of resolution—or transformation—by the end. When I tackled a novel, meanwhile, the concept needed to have more room to sprawl, possibly including a bigger cast of characters, a more complicated situation, the necessity of visiting a number of far-flung locations, and a ton of meaningful subplots, in order to create something that I felt like I could sustain at that length.

I really believed this idea for a long time. In All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night, and the five other novels I wrote prior to them, I always had a sense early on of how complicated and huge everything would become. Once or twice, early on, I started to write a couple of novels that didn’t quite take flight and ended up being compressed into short stories. But I’d never had a short story expand until it became a novel, and I felt as though I had developed a decent instinct for which ideas had novel-length legs and which didn’t.

And then 2020 happened.

Among other things that were happening in 2020, I was in the middle of writing the third book in my young adult Unstoppable trilogy, Promises Stronger Than Darkness. And I had an idea for a new novel about a young witch who teaches her mother how to do magic, which became my book Lessons in Magic and Disaster, out in August. I decided to cheat on Promises by working on Lessons at bedtime, because I love having multiple irons in the fire. Promises, of course, was a massive beast: multiple POVs, endless subplots, a storyline that traveled across the galaxy and involved the fate of worlds. So I decided that if I was going to play hooky while I worked on Promises, I would go to the opposite extreme. I set out to write Lessons in Magic and Disaster as if it was a short story, but I would go ahead and let it expand to novel length organically.

In other words, when I started writing Lessons in Magic and Disaster, I deliberately resisted doing any of the things I would normally do to make a novel feel more novel-ish. Instead, I would keep it fairly contained, like most of my short stories. Hence a very small number of characters, a few simple locations where we spend a lot of time, a fairly basic through line that launches on the first page and keeps generating situations until the last. (In fact, the first two chapters feel very much their own self-contained short story, which is why I was so happy to see them excerpted here at Uncanny.) And not that much in the way of subplots. I’ve read plenty of novels with this level of simplicity—I just hadn’t written one before.

The thing I’ve always loved about short stories is the amount of intimacy and intricacy you can build into a few thousand words. It’s easier to stay focused on one or two central relationships. The world might be ginormous, but you’re only going to get to know one corner of it really well. You can laser-focus on one or two big ideas and carry them through a lot of twists and turns. In some ways it’s easier to be personal in a short story, because you can burrow deep into the head of a single character who is navigating a crisis or making sense of something in their own life. So this was my attempt to lean into the short-story side of things, in order to write something a lot more personal.

I felt like this decision paid off—every night I would crawl into bed and write intense, emotive little scenes of Jamie talking to her mother, Serena, or sometimes her partner, Ro. These moments formed the core of the book, the thing everything else revolves around. It felt rather a lot like “Ghost Champagne” or “Rat-Catcher’s Yellows,” two of my stories that still feel extremely personal.

So I learned through trial and error that I had been completely wrong about the difference between novels and short stories—and maybe the only real difference between the two is that a novel needs to go on a lot longer, and thus more stuff just needs to happen. (With the definition of “happen” meaning anything from “planets are destroyed” to “somebody makes lunch.”)

The other thing I learned, though, is that complexity has a way of creeping in, no matter what I do.

At a certain point, roughly halfway through writing that first draft, I found Serena making a decision that I won’t spoil here—but it does lead to us getting to meet some other witches and learn a little bit more about witches in general. The cast of characters grows as the book goes on, which I often find to be the case. Also, I had decided that Jamie was going to be working on a Ph.D. about eighteenth-century literature, because well, I love eighteenth-century literature. Jamie’s dissertation got more important to the book’s plot, and I kept learning more interesting stuff about literature and gender roles in the Georgian era—and then my superstar editor Miriam Weinberg liked the eighteenth-century stuff and wanted me to expand it further. So I ended up writing a huge chunk of an eighteenth-century novel, plus letters and assorted other documents from the eighteenth century. Oops! Finally, I came to realize that we would never understand Serena’s point of view if we couldn’t see more of what her life had been like before the novel started, so I ended up writing an additional 30,000 words of flashbacks narrating Serena’s marriage to Jamie’s other mother, Mae, going all the way back to the 1990s.

The resulting novel is still my most intimate book, but it did end up having a wider cast of characters, and it finally sprouted some subplots. There’s a bit more worldbuilding than I’d originally bargained on. These things just demanded to be added—which felt maybe more organic than deciding in advance that I needed subplots and throwing them in.

My next novel, the one that hasn’t been announced yet but I’m hoping will come out in 2026, started its life as a novella. I wanted to write a couple of novellas that could come out after Lessons in Magic and Disaster, to bridge the gap before I could get another full-length novel done. One of those novellas landed right around 23,000 words, but the other one sailed past 40,000 words and just kept going, because it was intrinsically a more twisty idea and it kept needing more development than I’d bargained for. I kept assuring my agent and various other people that I would for sure be able to pare it back to novella-length, even as it got longer and longer. It ended up at around 75,000 words—still short by the standards of my novels.

So now I’m sort of thinking that I have no idea what something is going to be when I start writing it, although there are still story ideas that seem too big and complicated to ever fit into 5,000 words. Letting go of my preconceived notions about novels, novellas, and short stories feels liberating, and now I might just go writing a bunch of story ideas just to see what length they end up at. It’s always good to mess around without having a particular goal in mind, after all.

© 2025 Charlie Jane Anders