Short stories teach valuable lessons without requiring the commitment that a novel does. By virtue of being short, it’s easier to understand its ideas, structure, and processes. Short stories are often the length of one to three novel chapters, so mastering short stories trains you, on a building block level, to write novels.

Short stories are an important diagnostic tool. Any structural problems you face writing one will be amplified in larger mediums. If you’ve started novels but haven’t finished one, you’ve learned to make promises without necessarily learning to convey progression and deliver payoff. It’s much easier to practice all three in a short story.

Short stories force concision. In novels, you have a lot of words to play around with, and without examination, you may find yourself writing a lot without communicating much. It can be a deliberate choice to be verbose, but it’s crucial that it be a decision and not a result of thoughtless writing.

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Short stories are practice for revision. Writing short stories teaches you to write novels, likewise, editing short stories teaches you to edit novels. It’s easier to handle and complete, but you practice the same skills and learn the same fundamental lessons. Novels are just bigger and more complex, likewise, a novel’s problems are just more complex versions of what you face in a short story. Learning to diagnose and solve these problems in their simple form are necessary for tackling their larger ones.

Short stories build confidence. If you write five chapters of your novel and quit, that’s an incomplete novel, but the same number of words as five complete short stories imparts the self-assuredness that you can finish what you start. Everything you gain from writing short stories, from practical skills to belief in yourself, is heritable to writing novels.