Short Stories: Playpen or Mountain Lion?

A few days ago, I was invited to attend a local book club, led by my dear friend Peggy (holding the book), who had chosen an anthology of short mystery stories as their January read.  All the members had agreed to read my contribution (“Her Dangerously Clever Hands”) plus at least two other stories for the discussion. When the meeting began, one of the first questions a member asked me was, “What is the difference between writing a short story and a novel?” 

I had no pithy or easy answer, so, to begin, I shared this story:

Back in March 2019, I attended the Tucson Festival of Books. (For those who don’t know, it’s a remarkable event held every March on the U of A campus, with 50,000 people attending to listen to hundreds of authors, who write across every genre from cookbook to true crime. For more information, visit https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/) There, I attended a panel on the short story. Four published authors talked about their work in the genre, and one of them had a striking metaphor for the difference between a novel and a short story. I wish I could remember her name – but what I do remember is that she was, for many years, a ranger in a national (or state) park (or forest?) in the Pacific Northwest. For her job, she would patrol a certain number of square miles, and she knew that area intimately – where the established animal trails were, the fallen trees, the patch of a particular weed. But one day she came around a corner and there was a MOUNTAIN LION. After a startled moment, the lion growled, low in its throat, and she shouted back; the lion began to rear, and she pulled out the ax from her pack and waved it high over her head. The lion retreated, and after a few deep breaths, she collapsed against a tree. She concluded her tale: “A novel is like being on patrol; a short story is like an encounter with a mountain lion.” 

Everyone laughed – but they agreed that in short stories, often a large feeling is compressed into a tightly framed moment. I think about a story like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and recognize how it brilliantly limned a harrowing and potentially world-altering capacity for inhumanity and scapegoating in only a few short pages. 

I wasn’t writing short stories with any discipline or regularity at the time, but once I began, a few years ago, I used a different metaphor to describe them (perhaps because, to date, I’ve never encountered a mountain lion—knock wood). For me, short stories have often served as a place to experiment, rather like a playpen. There are low stakes and a finite amount of labor and energy required to begin a short story. There are parameters (word count, specific requirements for each publication) that provide some guidance, which makes me feel more comfortable trying out ideas and approaches outside my usual. 

That’s not to say short stories are easier – in many ways they’re more difficult to complete. Last week, when I performed my annual January office purge,  I found a draft of “The Dark Side of Bright Angel,” a short story I’d begun in 2017 that was finally published, after many revisions, in 2025. For me, short stories can take years to ripen and fine-tune. 

But for me, short stories are places to play with new elements, POVs, modes of expression, and so on. Specifically, all my novels are historical, set in 1870s London, told in first-person (“I”) and with one central character. So when I wanted to experiment with two protagonists, alternating chapters, third person POV instead of first, and a contemporary US setting, I wrote short stories, just to try these out. I learned things, including that third person alternating demands a wholly different mindset and requires new ways to represent internal feeling because I don’t have the same sort of direct access to the core of the “I.” Plus, I had to take into account an American way of looking at and representing things, rather than British. And modern technology and all things Internet. (Good grief, Victorian England really is easier.) 

“Her Dangerously Clever Hands” was historical (1870s London, my usual), but it was my first attempt to play with the idea of a woman thief as my heroine. (I had found a possible premise for my next book in the true history of the all-women thieving gang in Southwark, but it was early days.) For this short story, I began with my thief, Honora, returning from the penal colony in Australia. This premise led to questions: What would it be like to return and have no place, with only a few friends, if any? What if Honora brought back knowledge that someone else wouldn’t want known? What if she was accused of another crime? How will her experience in Australia have changed her? 

Plus, I wanted to bring back Inspector Michael Corravan because I missed him since Under a Veiled Moon. 

So this short story became the kernel of An Artful Dodge. In my novel, it’s not the protagonist who returns, but a former thief, Maggie O’Connell, who was arrested and transported twenty years before. But the short story allowed me to try out the idea of a woman thief as main character, to begin the research, and to enter the mind and heart of a woman finding her way back home.

So here's my question ...

If you’re an author, how would you describe writing a short story? Closer to a mountain lion encounter or a playpen? 

If you’re a reader, what’s your favorite short story – or one you read that really stuck with you?