Fitting Into a Fiction Medium

On June 4th, my first novel was published. This was shocking news to my library coworkers, who last heard of my writing side-gig when I shared a comic book I’d drawn back in 2022.

(7 Things I Learned While Writing Across Genres.)

“I thought you were the comic book guy…?” one coworker mumbled after the announcement. “Are you not doing any drawings anymore?”

She had a point: The jump from drawing 20-page junior educational comics to drafting a novel manuscript was like going from driver’s ed to jet fighting. Everything I knew about writing had to change if I didn’t want to crash and burn.

But that’s the boon of working at a library: There are endless ways to tell a story in our archives. A story that works in one medium might flop entirely in another. My second story idea is a queer romance about zombies, chronic disability, and empty towns, and I wanted to use the best medium possible for it—but how to narrow one down from a building full of them?

To start, I had to make a list of the pros and cons of our three major categories of fiction: Novels, Short Fiction, and Graphic Novels.

GRAPHIC NOVELS

PROS

The benefits of a comic are obvious: They’re BEAUTIFUL. 

Unlike a novel or a short story, which can take a while to build up interest or “get good,” a comic can catch a reader’s attention with a single panel. That isn’t to say they’re simpler than books—far from it. A good comic is a crafted miracle, balancing the impact and stunning color work of an artist with the gut-wrenching dialogue and unique settings of a writer. 

As a storytelling medium, they’re full of potential and criminally underrated.

CONS

The bad news is: Art takes an extremely long time. When I started my comic, I was baffled by all the things I’d never drawn before. Like a train. Or a shrimp. Or historical figure Chief Seattle. It isn’t the beautiful cover art that kills your wrist—it’s figuring out what shrimp look like. Which carries over to scripting as well; if it takes three days to draw a shrimp, it’s not practical to have a long story with complex scenes and a huge cast. Most comics have short, action-packed stories that can fit in a weekly magazine issue, with a single, distinct main character (like Batman or Monkey D. Luffy).

This was my first clue that my story idea wouldn’t work with the comic format I’d used last time. My comic was only 20 pages, with two main characters and simple backgrounds, but I’d still ended up cutting a lot of ideas to save the wrist pain. An older, bigger cast of characters in a grittier setting sounded exhausting—and, with The Walking Dead already in our comic collection, hard to sell.

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SHORT STORIES

PROS

A short story is a great way to experiment with a new idea. It has many of the benefits of comics—readable in an afternoon, fast-paced, can even be shared online—without needing me to draw any shrimp. 

It’s easy to get into for a new writer; art supplies are expensive and querying a novel is infamously hard; both options face a high risk of burn out part way through, leaving stories half-finished. Not to mention, our library already hosted several open mic nights and short story critique groups—if I wanted readers, they were never more than a meeting room away.

CONS

The biggest downside to a short story is obvious: It’s short. Like comics, short story formats struggle with complex world-building or large casts. Unlike a novel, which holds a reader for hours in the universe it’s created, a short story is a sample platter of ideas, prompting only a taste before making room for the next one in the collection. 

And if an author is unlucky enough to find their story printed next to a wildly different story or article, the whole collection can taste like a ham and strawberry and cigarette sandwich. Short stories have to be curated and paired with their neighbor stories for best impact.

While I loved the ease of a short story, my story idea didn’t seem like a good fit for it, either. A post-apocalyptic romance would need time to slow burn, and I wanted extra word count to really linger on the desolate setting. And as a mixed-genre story, I worried it might be too horror for our romance collections and too romantic for our horror collections, making it difficult to curate.

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NOVELS

PROS

If I asked a patron what they consider to be a “real book,” most would point me to our novels. They’re classic, well-regarded story tools. They can be anywhere from a couple dozen pages to several hundred, they come in a variety of genres, and the number of guides our library has on how to craft one is staggering. 

And it’s easier than ever to make one, too—I could have a novel finished, post it on Amazon, and have 100 copies ordered without ever leaving my desk chair. By far, they’re the most varied and adaptable category. The only limit is writing one!

CONS

Writing one.

Writing an entire novel is harder than comics and short stories combined. It’s the most common category, with thousands added to the archive every year, which means it takes a lot for one novel to stand out on its own. But a novel has none of the artistic beauty or open mic nights of the other two to help it along. It takes hours of painstaking labor, and unlike drawing a shrimp or picking a short story anthology to apply to, there’s no reference images or past issues to check for if you’re doing it right. It’s a leap of faith in all ways.

And that’s the dark truth I realized: A novel wasn’t a good fit for my story, either. I didn’t have a celebrity background or connections to help market my novel. I wasn’t sure if I could pull off apocalyptic romance without comic panels, and I wasn’t sure if I could keep someone’s attention for more than a short story without burning myself out. I didn’t even have money to put up an advertisement about it.

The truth is, there’s no such thing as the “right” medium for a story. Every medium has its standard story types, and also has ones that go directly against the norm. Every one has benefits and drawbacks.

In the end, I went with a novel solely because I wanted to try something new, and it sounded fun. And that’s all we can do with the mediums we have available: Try something new, and have fun.