Terry Brooks - Novels Versus Short Stories

Novels Versus Short Stories

After writing "Indomitable", a short story constituting an epilogue to The Wishsong of Shannara, Terry Brooks declared:

I find it much harder to write short stories than long fiction. I feel cramped by the lack of space and the dictates of the form. There is considerable difference in long and short fiction disciplines, and I am not good with the latter. I hope not to have to do many more of them, but you never know. I must have written Indomitable anywhere from four to five times, each effort different. Give me a five hundred page sprawl as an assignment any day.

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Famous quotes containing the words novels, short and/or stories:

    An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.
    George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)

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    The return of the asymmetrical Saturday was one of those small events that were interior, local, almost civic and which, in tranquil lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversation, of jokes and of stories exaggerated with pleasure: it would have been a ready- made seed for a legendary cycle, had any of us leanings toward the epic.
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