Draw Breath

Haruki Murakami's book of short stories, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman is making for fascinating reading. Oddly enough, there is strong cinematic potential to the stories despite the fact that a lot is left unspoken.

In the introduction to the book, Murakami compares writing novels to planting a forest, but writing short stories to planting a garden. He says that though writing a short story is a relatively quick process, revisions can be endless. This is echoed by the writer Claire Keegan in the Irish Times Saturday Weekend supplement this week, where she says that she could re-draft a single short story 30 times. Does this mean that the short story writing process is harder than the novel? if so, should we rank the quality of a short story higher than a novel?