It might have helped... or not. Although there are lots of things you can learn from short stories, they are not all that similar to short stories in terms of t

It might have helped... or not. Although there are lots of things you can learn from short stories, they are not all that similar to short stories in terms of the skills an author needs. For a short story writer the primary challenge is to introduce your characters, their problem and their actions in as few words as possible. Short fiction is focused. You've got one or two main characters who have one problem. Novels sprawl. They have many characters, many problems, and are typically spread over a much large time-scale. There are novels that aren't much more than "longer short stories" but they tend to be pretty thin stuff. So for a short story writer the problem is cutting out anything that is not absolutely necessary to the finished whole. For a novelist the problem is keeping in control of the huge unwieldy structure, because it's just really difficult to hold it all in your head at once. Software analogy: micro-controller development vs desktop application development. For the first you're mostly worried about resource usage. For the second you're mostly worried about it turning into an e-mail client, operating system, or EMACS over the course of development. I had written and published a very small number of short stories before writing a novel, but didn't really study them until after. One of the great things about short stories, it turns out, is that there's so little money in them that there are classes taught by really good authors very cheaply, at least in Canada (for anyone in Vancouver I highly recommend Caroline Adderson's weirdly-named but absolutely excellent course "Fiction Series for the Weekend Student" from SFU, which fundamentally focuses on short story structure: http://www.sfu.ca/continuing-studies/courses/cpw/fiction-series-for-the-weekend-student.html http://www.sfu.ca/continuing-studies/courses/cpw/fiction-ser...) I did write a couple of throw-away novels before writing "Darwin's Theorem", and while that process was useful, it didn't really prepare me for the real thing, which involves far more re-writing than anything else (at least the way I do it.) A book you're writing for practice can have all kinds of flaws... a book you're writing to publish has to be as perfect as you can make it (think of it as the difference between a weekend project for your own amusement vs code you're going to ship.)