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You can also put all their short stories together to form your novel.
You can, if the short stories are written properly. Otherwise, it's just a collection of short stories, not a novel.
You can also put all their short stories together to form your novel.
I'm just saying don't write them because you really want to write a novel, and think writing short stories will make that somehow easier. It won't.
Stories should never just "turn out" a certain length. Length should always be fully under the writer's control, even from the first story. Good, publishable short stories don't just happen, and neither do novels. To get all the elements right, you have to control length from page one. Page one, in fact, should determine whether it's going to be a short story, a novelette, a novella, or a novel.
You can also put all their short stories together to form your novel.
the idea that a story is different by thousands of words by the time you're done than when you set out seems like a given.
I guess that seems strange to me.
Like I'll start writing something and I'll think it's flash but it turns out to be 3k, or a novel I think should be 100k and ends up being 80k. Yeah if you set out to write flash and you end up with a 100k novel you're probably doing something wrong but the idea that a story is different by thousands of words by the time you're done than when you set out seems like a given.
Absolutely 100% agree with that.
I dunno. I think I half-agree with what you're saying.
Part of a writer's skillset is having an idea and being able to know, before you start writing, what kind of story it's going to be. Outliners I think can be more precise about this up front because outline. Pantsers, otoh, have to know a bit about their own writing mind and how a story is likely to evolve/accrue material before they reach the end. Particularly that latter group, the practice of writing is how that instinct evolves. And I think there's two sides of that practice: writing stories as they "feel" right, and seeing what length they end up, and also starting with a length and doing one's best to craft a story that fits -- not just in wordcount, but in terms of all the other elements you mentioned, a la pacing, plot, resolution, etc -- into that size. It's very much about how an individual writer's creative processes unfold.
Writing stories that fail can be very instructive, often in ways that ones that succeed aren't.
This is almost always, IME, a disaster, and if not, requires so much rewriting that one would have been better off just writing a novel to start with. For much the same reason that if you want a pet dog, you're better off just starting off with a dog, than by trying to build your dog out of a bunch of kittens.
Hello,
Another member's post made me think about something I'm planning on doing regarding short stories, and I wanted to know the thoughts of others on the matter.
I have an idea for a novel that I'm planning on writing eventually, but before that, I wanted to write short stories within the same "universe" following the same MC before the events in the novel. I plan on writing the novel to where a reader doesn't have to read the short stories to understand the novel, though.
The shorts will be like episodes in a show, semi-standalone, but with small connections.
Is this a good way to begin a storyline? Does it matter?
I think we're talking about different things. It's one thing to be a bad estimator and another to try to publish something you know got away from you. I've made a lot of things that are on-target for wordcount but the story itself completely ran off to God knows where. I mean, that's 9 years NaNoWriMo experience in a nutshell.
About your idea, it sounds to me like a novel-in-stories, which I can definitely see having some advantages:
...
Well, I think NaNo is the worst thing for new writers in the history of writing, so I'm not sure what to say about that.
I just don't believe stories "get away" from writers without the writer's permission.
There just are many successful novels as stories out there. It's very, very tough to manage.
You can, if the short stories are written properly. Otherwise, it's just a collection of short stories, not a novel.
I have an idea for a novel that I'm planning on writing eventually, but before that, I wanted to write short stories within the same "universe" following the same MC before the events in the novel. I plan on writing the novel to where a reader doesn't have to read the short stories to understand the novel, though.
The shorts will be like episodes in a show, semi-standalone, but with small connections.
Is this a good way to begin a storyline? Does it matter?