An Interview with Caitlin Horrocks

N.F.: When it comes to short-form and long-form fiction, some fiction writers prefer one form over the other and some have difficulty writing successfully in both forms. Now that you’ve written a novel and two short story collections, how would you compare the challenges of the two forms?

C.H.: I was a story writer before I was a novelist, and before I tried in any deliberate way to write a novel, I thought my main problem might be running out of things to say: I was so trained towards efficiency, towards compression. But it turns out I have no problem being long-winded! My real challenge in tackling the novel was psychological: when you’re writing stories, there are lots of little opportunities to check in with what you’re doing, to send a piece out and get a yes or no or a word of encouragement or redirection. A novel felt like a lot of eggs to put in one basket, artistically speaking: that I might spend literally years on a project only to feel like it wasn’t going anywhere good terrified me. But the only way out is through, and the novel got easier to write the more time I spent, well, writing it. One difference between stories and novels I’m not sure I ever reconciled was the difference between the 10–25-page arc of a story, and the longer narrative trajectory, suspense ratcheting ever upward, of many novels. The Vexations unfolds in sections that are suspiciously story-like, and I’d be interested in someday tackling a novel that has a different rhythm to it.