The big advantage of starting with short stories is that you get practice with endings. (In the nature of things most people have a lot of experience of hopeful starts, but much less of actually bringing a narrative to a conclusion...)
Although I can't talk, because I don't know that I ever finished *anything* until I started writing fan-fiction... and thinking about it, with hindsight I'm pretty sure the reason for that was not so much that the fan-fiction was shorter (because my early fanfics actually were novel-length sagas) but that for the first time in my life I coincidentally found myself planning the entire story through to the end before I wrote anything. Previously I'd always invented the plot as I went along, which meant that when I ran out of inspiration or got tired of writing, the story simply died. The fanfics were stories that I told to myself in my head and then decided to write down *afterwards*, which meant first of all that they had already undergone a winnowing process by being the ones that had not petered out midway, and secondly that I knew in considerable detail where they were going to end up and all the points along the way, and could thus keep going even without the impetus of new-dawning inspiration (and had a motive for wanting to do so, because I knew the ending was worth it).
But as a general principle from my own accidental experience I should definitely recommend starting with short stories of two or three scenes (bearing in mind that "All the Rules Rearranged", for one, was conceived as being a single chapter in three scenes), simply because you have the end there in sight before you, and it's nice and reachable. You get the experience of writing a whole thing, and finishing it, and tying off the ends, and it takes place over a timescale within which you can reasonably hope to maintain interest. Plugging away at something where the end is infinitely distant requires an awful lot of self-motivation, and having a number of past successes under your belt goes a long way towards making that possible.
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Date: 2021-11-27 06:54 pm (UTC)Although I can't talk, because I don't know that I ever finished *anything* until I started writing fan-fiction... and thinking about it, with hindsight I'm pretty sure the reason for that was not so much that the fan-fiction was shorter (because my early fanfics actually were novel-length sagas) but that for the first time in my life I coincidentally found myself planning the entire story through to the end before I wrote anything. Previously I'd always invented the plot as I went along, which meant that when I ran out of inspiration or got tired of writing, the story simply died. The fanfics were stories that I told to myself in my head and then decided to write down *afterwards*, which meant first of all that they had already undergone a winnowing process by being the ones that had not petered out midway, and secondly that I knew in considerable detail where they were going to end up and all the points along the way, and could thus keep going even without the impetus of new-dawning inspiration (and had a motive for wanting to do so, because I knew the ending was worth it).
But as a general principle from my own accidental experience I should definitely recommend starting with short stories of two or three scenes (bearing in mind that "All the Rules Rearranged", for one, was conceived as being a single chapter in three scenes), simply because you have the end there in sight before you, and it's nice and reachable. You get the experience of writing a whole thing, and finishing it, and tying off the ends, and it takes place over a timescale within which you can reasonably hope to maintain interest. Plugging away at something where the end is infinitely distant requires an awful lot of self-motivation, and having a number of past successes under your belt goes a long way towards making that possible.