Novel or short stories?

[ChristineDePisan]

Grateful for any thoughts...

I have been mulling over various ideas for a story for a while now. I have written a few of these up into what - with some more polish - could become quite satisfying short stories, with a proper start / middle / end, a couple of decent characters, bit of a twist etc. But I have seen on various fora that there is virtually no market for short stories outside magazines unless you are already an established author (not sure if this is true).

I can't decide whether I should look at self-publishing an anthology of short stories, and take one or two and try to expand them into a full length novel. Or if I should try to put some framing narrative around the disparate stories so that they bind together into a coherent story, "Love Actually" style. Or if I should just concentrate on getting them published individually in periodicals and see if that gives me a stepping stone to write something more substantive. Or something else!

I don't want to waste lots of time and energy on the "wrong thing"... What would you do?

I don't know anything about the market for short stories so can't really help but in your situation I would enter the story I liked best into a short story competition and see how it fared. Alternatively choose one and consider whether you could create a novel using those characters, that setting and the twist.

There is a very scant market for short stories in print but magazines pay pretty well if you can get your foot in the door. Get the writers and artists yearbook for a list of requirements and contact details

thanks, both - v helpful advice

Now I need to stop procrastinating and actually do it...

I always looked down on short stories a bit for the reasons for you describe, but now find them to be a good way to test ideas and characters, to see what sort of voice I can give them. I see writing short stories as a method to improve my own writing I suppose.

Yes I'd agree with what Monkey says.

Also short story competition are a very good way of getting an agent's attention. Short stories in book form are very hard to get published, but they are a good exercise in seeing if a character or a story has legs.