Short Stories Before A Novel

SampleGuy said:

You can also put all their short stories together to form your novel.

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You can, if the short stories are written properly. Otherwise, it's just a collection of short stories, not a novel.

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.

Hapax Legomenon said:

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.

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A piece of flash fiction is not written at all like a three thousand word short story. It doesn't have the same pace and flow, or even the same structure. If a piece of flash turns into a three thousand word short story, it's because you paced it as a three thousand word short story on page one.

Structure determines length. Structure really boils down to how far apart the basic pieces of the story are, and this is determined by how long you make each piece.

Opening, middle, and ending are all distinct things, even in flash fiction. If you want to write an eight hundred word flash fiction story, you can't write five hundred words of opening. Five hundred words of opening gives you a three thousand word short story, not an eight hundred word piece of flash fiction.

Length has always been easy for me because somehow pace and structure from all the reading I'd done before starting to write just stuck in my head, but it's one of the more difficult things I've had to teach.

But it really comes down to knowing how long each piece of the story needs to be when you start to write. At most, you have two hundred words to play with when writing the opening of an eight hundred word short story. So, from the first sentence, you have to set pace, flow, and content for that two hundred word mark.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing to sit down intending to write an eight hundred word piece of flash fiction, but to write a three thousand word short story instead. If all the pieces fit, if the pace, flow, and structure all belong to a three thousand word short story, that's great.

But my experience with slush piles and workshops is that, all too often, the pieces don't fit. The writer starts with an eight hundred word story in mind, but something gets away from him. He loses control, and when he does the story loses pace, flow, and structure because at least one piece is far longer than it should be, and the story just doesn't read well.

Structure matters. Pace and flow matter. Knowing when to transition matter. Just as I see a lot of short stories that read poorly because the writer didn't control these things, I see one hundred thousand word "novels" that are really just short stories that got out of control. A one hundred thousand word short story is not a novel, it's just a short story the writer didn't control, and it's alwasy incredibly boring.

Anyway, if you have the knack that lets pace, flow, and structure come naturally, that lets you start a story any way you want, that lets you write at whatever length without worrying about how the pieces fit, then all I've said is irrelevant. Whatever length your stories come out, they'll be paced and structured properly simply because you have the natural knack for writing this way.

But few writers have this knack, and when they don't control story, story doesn't happen very well at all.

zanzjan said:

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.

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I think we're at least close to being on the same page. I've always had the knack for making any story come out at the length I wanted. This just seemed to come naturally to me. I could look at a magazines guidelines, read a few issues, determine what what specific length they preferred, and just write it. The pace, flow, and structure needed to make a story 1,500 words, or 4,000 words, or whatever, was just there in my head. I suppose it stuck there because of all the reading I'd done.

Because it's more or less a knack for me, it makes it tough to explain what I'm even talking about, let alone how to do it properly.

I will say that even though it definitely was a knack, honing it didn't hurt. I really wanted to sell short stories, and I knew this meant giving magazines the length they wanted, and that length only counted if all the parts were correct. The pace, flow, and structure must fit the length. The opening, middle, and ending must fit the length, etc. Otherwise, the story is a poor read, and it won't sell.

Journalism class really helped me hone this knack. When a journalism professor asked for a 750 word piece, or a 1,500 word piece, or a five thousand word piece, he meant it. If the finished story wasn't within just a few words of the count he wanted, we had to rewrite it.

I also actively looked for magazines that wanted 750 word stories, or 1,500 word stories, or 3,000 word stories, etc. Instead of writing a story of whatever length, and then looking for a market, I found the market first and wrote the story to match. Doing so worked wonders for my sales, and really finished honing the knack I had for length.

When I combined this with being able to give editors something no one else could give them, or something no one else had given them, I started sell almost everything I wrote. This latter wasn't all that difficult to learn. The one thing I could give an editor that no one else in the world could give them was myself. It sounds simple now, but it came as a revelation to me.

I also learned that if I gave an editor characters with professions, mannerisms, etc., that he hadn't seen before, and placed the story in a realistic, detailed setting the he hadn't seen before, the story was likely to sell, even if it wasn't particularly original in plot. Editor after editor commented on original characters and detailed, original setting, even in story blurbs. I have no doubt I slipped a lot of stories into print that would have been rejected otherwise because of this.

Anyway, I agree with trying to make a bunch of short stories a novel. This very rarely works, though I think that's more or less what Ray Bradbury did with The Martian Chronicles.

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.

B.G. Dobbins said:

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?

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About your idea, it sounds to me like a novel-in-stories, which I can definitely see having some advantages:

1) Perhaps easier to manage in smaller pieces, even though they'd all have to fit under an overall larger story arc.

2) Possibly, some of those stories can be published separately and thereby used as advertising for the book (Careful there, though. Publishers generally like some individual stories to have already been published before they accept a collection but I don't know how that applies to publishers of novels. Maybe someone else knows more).

3) I like the idea of kind of hedging your bets with short stories and a novel in one. So many novels end up trunked that it's nice to think at least parts of one might still be published anyway.

I'd do it on the main story instead, though. That sounds much more appealing than "the story before the story," which I picture as a long, drawn out prologue. Then again, if it works, it works, so just a thought.

Now I'll go read the other responses, which I probably should have done first...

Hapax Legomenon said:

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.

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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.

Fruitbat said:

About your idea, it sounds to me like a novel-in-stories, which I can definitely see having some advantages:

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There just are many successful novels as stories out there. It's very, very tough to manage.

Jamesaritchie said:

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.

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Oh no, NaNoWriMo is great and teaches you many useful things!!

Writing a successful novel just happens to not be one of them.

Jamesaritchie said:

There just are many successful novels as stories out there. It's very, very tough to manage.

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What is tough to manage? I don't understand your post. You are saying you think a novel-in-stories is tough to write well?

Jamesaritchie said:

You can, if the short stories are written properly. Otherwise, it's just a collection of short stories, not a novel.

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Do they also need some connections to be a novel?

My strategy is to take the short stories and post them on my website. That way people can take a look at my writing and decide whether they like it enough to dig in to some of my longer projects. Take Brandon Sanderson and Jim Butcher, for example; they've got short fiction up on their author blogs, even a whole novel in Brandon's case.

As I publish the Pegasus Wars trilogy, I'm going to post up one or more short stories as teasers in between each book. Character intro stories, mostly.

That's a good idea. Maybe I might do the same thing for my novel.

B.G. Dobbins said:

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?

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This has been an interesting post. I'm doing something similar for one of my WIP. I think we may be on the same page. Let me spell out how this format fell into my lap.

My family loves dark fantasy from a philosophical stand-point. Particularly where common elements like vampires come into play. Every major vampire craze that gets kicked up, we like to sit down and find the traits and unique twists each author takes on vampires (or whatever other recurring race/monster) and discuss them.

In doing this a while back, I asked myself what I would do with a vampire novel. I read plenty, but had never tackled the genre. So I sat down to work through this very question. The result was actually four lists, each technically vampires, and a forming plot weaving these races together and a world where they existed in the shadows.

To fully explain each race, I sat down to write a short story that featured a MC that belonged to one of the four races of vampire, delving deeper and deeper into the secrets of the world with each telling.

In format, however, I pictured these four stories being released together as "Book 1" of the growing story. Laced around the stories as a sort of Prologue/Interlude/Epilogue arrangement I placed another story, that was a novelist that was being told these stories. The being giving him the stories offers other details in these "betweeners" that link each story into the backstory of the world and then catapults the novelist into the next phase of the story, where he seeks out and interacts with the four MCs of the short stories while sorting out the place that all five of them have in the schemes of the story's antagonists.

That leg of the story would be told as a full-fledged novel describing the novelist's journey and the unfolding drama as he interacts with the others.

I can't see any other way that this story would unfold. Sure, the short stories are "prequels" but the telling of them and the "betweener" story of the novelist as he hears them establishes the world and gives each character (and thus each race) a chance to stretch its legs and be recognized before being thrown together going into the second part of the journey.

This sort of thing was done very successfully by Stephen King, whether intentional or not. His popular short story "Night Surf" was published in a magazine in 1969 (you can find a pdf of it online and have a peek). In 1978 he published his novel "The Stand" which loosely relates to the events covered in Night Surf. It does not involve the same characters, but the world and events covered in Night Surf is the same as in The Stand.
Just food for thought.

This idea is exactly what I'm doing right now. I've got a detailed epic fantasy world fully fleshed out, lots of characters with back stories, three continents, several Ages, and so on. I've got a main novel which I've been slowly crafting and is currently about 60,000 words. I also have three "origin" stories focusing on MCs from the main novel, meant to give the reader a non-essential introduction before the novel comes out. The origin stories are in varying stages of draft, and it looks like one will be short story length, one novelette length and one novella length. My plan is to release them in stages, in this order: short story > novelette > novella > novel. After that, it's whatever I write and however long it turns out.