Your friend, the painter, invites you over to view her new works. The first painting is a minimalist masterpiece. It’s a still life, of a green apple next to a rat, on a windowsill. The rat could be alive or dead. It’s hard to say. You stare at it for a long time. Why these elements? Was the rat trying to eat the apple? Was the apple poisoned? How is the apple connected to the rat? And why the windowsill? Is it an escape from the cycle of life and death? Is it a window of hope?
The second painting is entirely different. It is a wash of subtle colors, paint strokes, light blurring. While elements are identifiable and present, they blend together creating an overall mood, a richness, a lushness that you want to sink into. You stand in front of it and drink it in, luxuriating in effect.
A short story, because of its compression, hyper-focuses the reader’s attention on the elements that are there. If the only elements are an apple, a dead rat, and a windowsill, the reader will work to create meaning from the resonance between those elements. The reader assumes those elements are deliberately chosen and presented precisely, in the right order, in the right proportion. If you write a short story about a walk in the park and a cat crosses the path of the protagonist, the reader will pay attention and assume that the cat means something. If you mention that the cat is black, the reader will consider what that could mean. (Bad luck? Or a subversion of that superstition?)
If the cat ends up doing nothing in the story, the reader will feel the story is incomplete.
A novel doesn’t work this way, though. A novel necessarily contains so many elements — and by elements here, I mean, and I realize I’ve been too vague, I mean anything the reader could pay attention to. I know that’s a big category. But I mean everything from diction to plot events to description to emotional beats. Everything the writer controls, in other words, that can form the reader’s experience. In a novel, the sheer length of it as compared to a short story means that the reader is not hyper-focused on each element. They’re reading to let the novel wash over them, to let the important elements emerge as they go. If a black cat crosses the character’s path in a novel, the reader doesn’t immediately perceive it as a significant element that they need to remember. It could be part of the overall mood, the setting, it could be there to illuminate a character detail. In a novel, we’d only realize the cat is important if that element is somehow recalled or repeated. For example, if the character tells someone about the cat later. Or if the cat returns. Or if another cat arrives. Then we think, oh, there’s something about the cat I have to remember.
So, this is something to work on, for a self-study course. Read short stories and novels, and pay attention: what do I notice? Why do I notice it? What do I think it means? Why did the writer choose to include it?
And as a writer, I need to remember to ask myself, what will the reader think if I include this element? What sorts of meanings will they be creating if I put these elements together?