In an intimate room on Boylston Street in downtown Boston, novelist Michelle Hoover leads her students through a fiction workshop. If it weren’t for the pricey view—an autumn game of touch football on a leaf-strewn Boston Common—it would appear just the same as any other workshop in any other city or town across the country. Each of the five students holds a copy of the manuscript to be considered, each copy marked up in earnest red ink. They sit around a conference table, cautious of one another in the way workshop writers often are, raising their questions and their confusions with a gentle hesitancy that signals respect for the writer’s feelings. They preface every other comment with, "Maybe it’s just me, but.…" The writer, in this case Rebecca Taylor, nods and scribbles notes in a leather journal. Only occasionally does she look to Hoover, who is mostly quiet, for affirmation.

Before long though, it becomes clear that this is not a typical fiction workshop. The students are critiquing Taylor’s novel, "The Last Days of the Blind Age," a complete draft of which they read months ago. This afternoon they are beginning a second read, focusing on the first chapter of the revised draft, and it’s obvious the class is invested in Taylor’s work in a way that only readers of a novel can be. As they address the changes she has made from the previous draft, they talk of chapter and structure, of scene and pacing, but they can’t keep from mentioning their love of certain characters and their visceral attachment to them.

This sense of engagement points to the truth of what nineteenth-century author and Atlantic Monthly editor William Dean Howells claimed when questioning why collections of short stories don’t sell: "We become of a perfect intimacy and a devoted friendship with the men and women in the short stories, but not apparently of a lasting acquaintance," he wrote. "Recurrence and repetition seem necessary to that familiar knowledge in which we hold the personages in a novel." It’s precisely that familiar knowledge and lasting acquaintance with character that has changed the dynamic of this particular workshop.

These students have committed an entire calendar year to one another and to one another’s novels, a commitment that includes reading each and every student’s novel—twice. The class is an experiment offered by Grub Street, an independent center for creative writing in Boston, and its aim is to fill a hole left by the near-exclusive concentration on the short story by traditional graduate workshops. Chris Castellani, Grub Street’s artistic director and a novelist himself, explains that the center realized that "MFA programs weren’t addressing the needs of our students who wanted to write novels. They would come to us and say they already had MFAs and knew nothing more about writing novels than they did when they entered their program, or they’d say they were researching MFAs and were being told by the programs that they would be discouraged from workshopping novels."

This is certainly the case for Rebecca Taylor. She’s currently an MFA candidate at Emerson College and is taking the Grub Street class on top of her graduate program’s course load. She enrolled in a class Emerson offered on the novel but was frustrated by the time constraints of the single-semester course. Each writer had time to submit only a couple of chapters for critique. "Imagine," she says, "reading a random chapter of a novel without reading the rest. You could praise the individual scenes and sentences, but you could say nothing about whether the chapter was working as part of a whole." Taylor has wanted to write a novel since she was in seventh grade, and only now, she says, in the Grub Street course, is she learning how to do it.

The Grub Street experiment raises some uncomfortable questions for MFA programs across the country. Sure, the short story is a great pedagogical device for teaching certain aspects of fiction writing. Like a great country song, it’s a display of craft, it reveals emotion through compression, and, in an hour-long workshop, can be chiseled down to its essential parts. The novel, on the other hand, is a loose and sprawling thing, a symphony as compared with the story’s simple country tune. But no one dreams of writing the Great American Short Story Collection, and every MFA candidate working on short stories knows, or should know, the market for story collections is limited at best. When publishers want fiction, they want a novel. Yet the typical MFA workshop urges students to concentrate on the story, leaving the would-be-novelist with a diploma and the daunting task of writing a novel by extrapolating what she knows about writing a story.   

But the difference between constructing a short story and constructing a novel is like the difference between building a rowboat and building a yacht: They both have to float, but one is bigger and grander and meant to carry more people farther. Just as the yacht is not simply a bigger rowboat, the novel is not a big short story; knowledge of one doesn’t necessarily translate into knowledge of the other.  

I speak from experience. After graduate school I was determined to master the short story. I poured all my time into a story collection, ignoring the idea of a novel completely because I believed that behind the MFA model there was a process: Learn the short form, understand its internal mechanics, its scenes and its structure, its dialogue and its character, and the longer form of the novel would come naturally. Yes, I loved the short story and still do, but I also thought of it as a stepping-stone, the apprentice’s form. I thought one built the yacht by building dozens of rowboats. That seemed to be what graduate school was attempting to teach.

With each of my stories that found its way to publication, I’d get a half dozen queries from agents who expressed admiration for my work and wondered if I had anything worth their time. Whenever I replied that I had a nearly complete story collection, their reaction was icy—if they reacted at all. It took me too long to realize what they wanted was a novel. I didn’t understand until a generous agent spent the time to outline in an e-mail how one of my stories could be turned into a novel.  

So I took his advice, took it as a sign that I was finally ready to write that book. My apprenticeship, I figured, was over.

What was slowly and very painfully revealed to me in the following months was that the novel and the short story are separate beasts entirely. In an essay for the Rumpus, novelist and critic William Giraldi writes, "The novel is as different from a collection of stories as a truck is from a tricycle: They both have wheels, yes, and will get you where you need to be, though in decidedly dissimilar fashions and with dissimilar degrees of alacrity." What I had after months of work was neither truck nor tricycle, but some awful seventy-five-page amalgamation of the two that would not steer straight (Philip Larkin’s "a beginning, a muddle, and an end"). In reality what I had was a graduate degree in fiction writing but no notion of how to construct a novel. Despite having a handful of publications, I had the sinking feeling I was a fraud. I became convinced that I knew how to write a novel about as well as I knew how to build a yacht. Novel-panic had set in.

Giraldi, in that same Rumpus essay, takes on the simplest solution to the short story writer’s novel problem: that odd hybrid, the novel-in-stories. But this hardly solves anything. "Exchanging characterization for concept," he writes, "and dismissing narrative continuity," the novel-in-stories only reinforces the notion that the story writer can carry a single narrative only a few dozen pages. Giraldi blames the recent rise of this hybrid on commercial publishing and its desire "to sign young writers fresh from the MFA mill" without having "to wait for those young writers to learn how to write a novel."

Dan Chaon, the author of two story collections and two novels, most recently Await Your Reply (Ballantine Books, 2009), spoke in a recent interview, published in the Believer, about how difficult the transition from successful short story writer to novelist can be. "I was under contract to Ballantine to deliver a novel," he said, "and I’d written a one-page proposal-summary, but I really had no idea how to proceed." Chaon wrote the first draft of what would become his debut novel, You Remind Me of Me (Ballantine Books, 2004), "as if it were a very long short story” and “it was a disaster."

Chaon credits his editor at Ballantine for helping him find the structure of the novel, but most of us are not so lucky as to have a novel under contract before it is written. In my own dark night of novel-panic, I turned in the direction all writers turn: to books. The one piece of advice I remembered getting in graduate school was to read only the great novels when in the midst of your own. (This was in a novella workshop, my MFA program’s solution to novel-panic. The novella, it turns out, is the fraternal twin of the short story, bigger maybe, but sharing the same DNA; it’s but a distant cousin of the novel.) But this seems advice better suited to the short story. One can see how Raymond Carver, for example, could be influenced by reading Chekhov, but a Tolstoy novel is, as Henry James said, a “loose, baggy monster,” and someone who can find inspiration in Proust is a better writer than I.

Still I scoured the stacks, and what I found was a whole industry of how-to manuals meant to get the would-be novelist over the hump of novel-panic—often in ninety days or less. The worst of these are little better than self-help books, what John Gardner called "self-help fleecers," offering things like a contract in pseudolegalese between the writer and herself ("I pledge to work diligently and habitually, even when I’m tired, hungry, cold, grouchy, or lonely."). Most of them are surely 
helpful to the novice writer; they provide the kind of exercises one might find in an intro class: writing prompts about the writer’s earliest memories or a character’s biggest fears. Probably few people follow these manuals and achieve a finished work, and if they do, they get little more than formulaic fiction.

One such book that promises a novel in ninety days (twenty-eight days to think up a story and outline it) claims, "If we were to write four pages for the next sixty-two days, we would have a 248-page first draft." While the math is certainly correct, this does not strike me as particularly helpful advice. One could also fry an egg in thirty seconds but that does not mean it will taste good. I tend to prefer my drafts a little less rough, in need of something between sandpaper and a rock polisher, not between an excavator and a dump truck. To be fair, most of these strive only to teach a writer to create a draft quickly; however, the speed of production relies so heavily on formula that the writer whose aim is art is necessarily excluded.  

Too many of these books are written by authors who have never actually published a novel, yet think they are somehow qualified to teach others. Or they’re written by genre writers who believe their methods translate to any kind of fiction. The most representative is offered by the Dummies series of books. It’s called Writing Fiction for Dummies. Since no one during the editing process thought that maybe calling it Fiction Writing for Dummies was a better idea, the book is probably not the best source of advice. It’s the only manual I found that includes a section on finding the right chair. (For your information, "ample room around your hips and thighs" and "a five-point base with casters" are important.)

The canonical books are better, of course, the ones every writer seems to have on the shelf. E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927), for example, breaks down the elements of a novel into seven distinct parts: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. It is essentially a survey course on the structure of the novel, and indispensable for that. At times its tone can be more academic than your typical "guide to writing," as the publisher labels it on the cover; lecture-hall dust-motes float through the prose, and the essays, which originated in lectures Forster gave at Trinity College, are heavy on Cambridge wit. The book is concerned more with the function than the functioning of the novel. For Forster, "the whole intricate question of method resolves itself not into formulae but into the power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting what he says." Forster won’t tell you how to write the novel, but he will explain how the writing and the structure affect the reader, which for a serious writer is an equally important objective.

For my money, the best teacher of novel writing is John Gardner. In the midst of my novel-panic, his was a calm voice of reason. He is the only one to note that "the novelist is in a fundamentally different situation from the writer of short stories," and he is certainly the only one who acknowledges not only the existence of MFA programs but also the problems with them. Part pep talk and part analysis of what makes a good novelist, his On Becoming a Novelist is tailor-made for the writer suffering novel-panic. (He does occasionally digress into the peculiar, however: An indicator of a novelist’s talent is "a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both," he writes.) Unlike the writing manuals, Gardner’s books do not dole out rules. "The god of novelists will not be tyrannized by rules," he writes. Instead, in The Art of Fiction he gives advice and his best guess at how novels work. Too dense to be synthesized, it is a book of novel-writing wisdom that includes, in a chapter on plotting, the difference between writing a short story and writing a novel. Though Gardner can’t solve the issues the short story writer faces when sitting down to work out a novel, he alone seems aware of them—he did, after all, spend his life teaching fiction writers—and both his books quiet some fears and point out some errors of the story writer. Like the encouraging yet strict professor I never found in graduate school, Gardner’s books got me back to the desk.

***

Ultimately, no book or teacher can show you how to write a novel. The novelist succeeds or fails alone, and the paralysis of novel-panic is alleviated in only one of two ways: Either one stumbles his way toward a book, or one gives up entirely. The best advice Gardner has for the struggling novelist is that "above all one writes and writes." And though he never says it directly, he insinuates that one reads and reads. But it’s not his only advice. He also believes the young novelist "belongs in a novel-writing workshop" because "he needs people who believe in him, give him a shoulder to cry on, and value what he values.” The difficulty of finding that community, however, is easy to test: Ask a friend, a writer-friend, to read a draft of a short story and generally she will say yes, but ask her to read a draft of your novel and you’ll likely hear a different answer.

This may explain why MFA programs typically don’t workshop a whole novel. It simply demands a level of dedication and time commitment on the part of both students and instructors that sometimes just isn’t there. The Grub Street workshop, on the other hand, proposes to motivate a community of serious writers, outside the traditional academic setting, to take novels seriously over an extended period of time. It’s still in an experimental phase, but if it continues to be successful, the folks in Boston may have found a way to cure novel-panic—and a whole new way for novelists to workshop.

John Stazinski teaches writing and literature at Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester, Massachusetts. His writing has appeared most recently in Glimmer Train Stories, the Southern Review, the Hopkins Review, and the Missouri Review.