There are pitfalls specific to short stories If I added something while writing, I had to follow through the cause and effect of this throughout the novel, and I needed a plan to chart the ripple effect of every action. Over many re-writes, I moved ideas around in these sections. I found a useful device of sectioning the story into the nine weeks the protagonist had in his summer holidays between primary and secondary school. With my novel, I plotted the story in chapters. So, depending on your point of view, the short story took an afternoon or 20 years to write. When I sat down to write it, it took an afternoon. Over the years, I added to this image – snatches of dialogue, thoughts and feelings, an event I experienced, and finally, an image from a story someone else told me, which provided the key to my own story. For example, when I was a student, 20-odd years ago, I had an image of a son tickling his mother's legs after she had returned from a long day standing at work. I tend to have an idea and hold it in my head, sometimes for months or sometimes years. I don't sit down and draw up a plan for a short story. Time works differently for me in relation to writing a short story and a novel. The planning process can differ for each form, but there is no formula To describe the day-to-day life and the cumulative effect of living in fear, on one boy, his family and the community at large, the reader needed to spend time with that boy, in that community. For example, when I wanted to capture what it was like for a whole generation of children to grow up in Northern Ireland knowing nothing else but The Troubles, I knew that this had to be done in a novel. The novel, like a film, can take us on a journey, capture many lives, cover lifetimes/generations, discuss a society or the history of a culture. It can be a character portrait or a moment captured in time. A photographer will be thinking about every tiny detail in the frame and how it conveys meaning. You could perhaps draw the following analogy to compare the two: a short story would be like producing a photograph, while a novel would be more like making a film.

The Paris Review and The New Yorker have wonderful archives with interviews and short stories by the best writers of the form. Reading interviews with great writers talking about the subject can be really useful too. Each form has its own attributes and the best way to see how short stories work is to read as many as you can. The short story, novella and novel are all different forms, so length is just one of the issues – the short story is not a very short novel, nor is a novel a very long short story.

Producing a 3,000-word short story is not the same investment as producing a 90,000-120,000-word novel. How do you bring a reader on a long journey and keep them reading right through to the end? Although this is true to an extent, the novel has major challenges, too.

They may put this down to every word having to count in a short story, while the narrative is allowed to meander in a novel. Some writers believe short stories are harder to write than novels. Are short story writers getting a raw deal? How is writing a short story different? Northern Ireland's Paul McVeigh, author of The Good Son, compares.

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