Posts tagged ‘writing’

Jan 18

Writing an Episodic Genre Series (part 3 of 3): The Hero’s Emotional Journey

NOTE! This is the third installment in a three-part series on writing episodic genre series. This post will focus on using the hero’s emotional arc to link the standalone installments in the episodic series. The previous two posts focused on the episodic hero, and the episodic plot respectively.

This past week, I have been writing about episodic series in science fiction and fantasy. While the episodic hero is central to any episodic series, and while each book in such a series relies on a solid episodic plot to keep the reader turning pages, it is the hero’s emotional journey which keeps the reader buying new books in the series.

Each Book as a Step on the Emotional Path

Plot can keep an episodic book going, but plot alone will not carry a series. If the reader is to buy the next book, they have to care about the hero. If the hero does not evolve over the course of the series, if the hero doesn’t change or grow due to the choices made, then readers will quickly stop caring.

This is harder to do in a long-term episodic series than one might think. For one thing, the seeds of that character growth should show up early on. The defining characteristics of the hero’s personality, of their values, and of their emotional journey should already be there in book one. At the close of each book, the hero should have taken at least one (or more) steps on their emotional journey.

Ray Lilly’s journey in Game of Cages shows a good example of the hero having to come to terms with the reprehensible acts he might commit in the name of the greater good. Lilly’s squeamishness and his innate goodness are traits established early on in book one, and the hardening that occurs in book two was foreshadowed (predicted) by more experienced characters (his employer) in the first book. The fact that Connolly follows through with this hardening, and that this toughening becomes a key emotional facet of book two speaks well to both the author’s skill and to the overall emotional journey that the series will take.

Heroes Stumbling on the Emotional Journey

But that journey need not be a stately progression. Heroes can step forward, step backward, step sideways. Like real people, they can make mistakes and it is concern over those mistakes that can keep readers engaged. Within the confines of any single book, the direction of their evolution is immaterial. Heroes are allowed to make the wrong judgment call as much as we are. What matters is that in each book their character does change in some way, that the character’s state at the end of the book is clear, and that at the opening of the next book that state is maintained. This helps to make the books flow together, and leaves the reader satisfied with the overall series. If the character isn’t changed by their experiences, the series will quickly start to ring flat and eventually readers will just tune out.

One method that is frequently used is to introduce the hero’s personal life as a sub-plot that spans the series. Harry Dresden’s relationship with his mother, his fairy godmother, his half-brother, and other family members (including new ones that show up later in the series) becomes an evolving sub-plot that spans the books. This emotional sub-plot weaves into the fabric of the superficial plots, contributing to the more action-oriented conflicts that Harry has with various factions in his magical world.

In some books, relationships like these are tangential to the direct action of the plot. But they provide the hero with an emotional tension and concerns outside of the direct challenge in front of him. These relationships and the emotions they evoke in the hero and reader represent “the other shoe” that the reader knows will drop at some point.

Relationship between Emotional Arc and The Plot

Such emotional arcs can either be used tactically (to modify pacing, to foreshadow events for a future book, etc.) or they can be used thematically. The Sookie Stackhouse novels painstakingly explore themes of Sookie’s relationships with lovers, family, friends, society, etc. In a very real sense, this exploration is central to the entire series. However, this emotional arc should be separate from the plot arc of the story. And just as series plotting can become formulaic, so too can the emotional journey.

To a great extent, they’re like the double helix of an episodic series’ DNA: they move in parallel, but they rarely cross. In those instances where they do cross – namely when the emotional aspect of a relationship from one book becomes the plot engine for another – then it is best to have another emotional strand waiting in the wings to be introduced. If a particular book is such an emotional intersection, then the strand in waiting need not be introduced or focused on: doing so risks trying to pack too much into what should be a tightly-plotted, fast-paced book. But the seeds for that strand in waiting should be planted, such that they can be further developed or focused on in the next book.

The Denouement: Leaving the Reader Eager for More

I have always found the conclusion to an episodic series book to be absolutely critical to maintaining my interest in the subsequent books. The hero concludes the adventure, the monster is slain, and now it’s time for some well-earned rest. In an episodic series especially, the denouement sets the stage for the next book. It sums up the emotional changes that the character underwent as a consequence of their adventures. Because editors like to have episodic series published annually (keep those reprints rolling!), odds are the author is already aware of what the next book will bring. The denouement offers an excellent opportunity to plant the seeds without leaving the dreaded cliff-hanger ending.

It’s hard to get right, and it is especially hard to get right consistently across multiple books. An impression I get is that much episodic fiction tends to skimp on the denouement: the action is over, so the book just ends. While an abrupt denouement may work for some readers, I think it weakens the ties between books in the series.

If the denouement is an outgrowth of the hero’s emotional journey, it should effectively outline (or at least hint at) the starting conditions for the next installment’s emotional journey. If written well, it can also hint at the stakes of the next installment’s emotional arc as well, although this runs the risk of a cliff-hanger ending. A good example of an artfully-handled denouement can be found in Brust‘s Teckla. To avoid spoilers, I won’t go into what happens or how he handles the denouement, but it manages to avoid abruptness, provides closure for the plot, but leaves enough unresolved emotional strands that the door is open for future emotional evolution…which the author addresses in subsequent books. The end result is that the end of the first book increases our emotional investment in the hero, and makes us want to learn what happens to him in the next book.

Conclusion

There are critics inside and outside of the science fiction and fantasy community who tend to view episodic series as less worthy. Episodic series generally don’t win the Hugos, the Nebulas, or the World Fantasy Awards. But they do sell. And they sell a lot. Many episodic series regularly find themselves at the top of bestseller lists, whether we’re talking about Locus, or even The New York Times.

Many readers get their first and only exposure to genre from such episodic series. Consider the countless people who would never wander into the “horror” or “fantasy” aisles at their local bookstore, but who love Sookie Stackhouse. As a result, these episodic series are a powerful missionary force for the genre. They extend genre reading protocols across a broader audience, and they provide adults and children with plenty of enriching entertainment. While they may eschew lyrical prose styles and experimentation, I suggest that is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the more people read any type of genre fiction the stronger the genre becomes. And if we look to our own history, who do we remember? We remember the episodic heroes: Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Nero Wolfe, James Bond.

An Attempt at an Absolutely Non-exhaustive Episodic Reading List

Sub-genre	Author	Series	First Book
Adult Urban Fantasy	Jim Butcher	The Dresden Files	Storm Front
Adult Urban Fantasy	Harry Connolly	Twenty Palaces	Child of Fire
Adult Urban Fantasy	Kate Griffen	The Mattew Swift Novels	A Madness of Angels
Paranormal Romance	Laurell K. Hamilton	Anita Blake series	Guilty Pleasures
Paranormal Romance	Charlaine Harris	Sookie Stackhouse Novels	Dead Until Dark
Paranormal Romance	Kim Harrison	Rachel Morgan series	Dead Witch Walking
Adult Fantasy / SF	Steven Brust	Vlad Taltos Novels	Teckla
Adult Fantasy / SF	Richard K. Morgan	Takeshi Kovacs series	Altered Carbon
YA / Middle-grade	(various)	The 39 Clues	The Maze of Bones
YA / Middle-grade	Eoin Colfer	Artemis Fowl	Artemis Fowl

Jan 11

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Writing an Episodic Genre Series (Part 1 of 3): Episodic Heroes

I recently had the pleasure of reading the first two books in Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces series, and this got me thinking about the nature of episodic science fiction and fantasy. By episodic series, I’m thinking a four, five, ten book series where each book is a standalone story where the series’ principal character goes on whatever type of adventure is typical for that character. Think books like Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books, or Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels. How are these kinds of episodic books constructed? What makes them tick?

NOTE! This is the first in a three part series of posts. This post is focused on the episodic hero. On Saturday, I’ll post the next chapter, focusing on the episodic plot, and the final post on Tuesday will focus on the hero’s emotional journey.

Epic vs Episodic: What’s the difference?

Science fiction and fantasy are replete with series. That’s perfectly reasonable, when we consider that publishers, authors, and agents all love the “automatically” accumulating reprint sales that series make possible. But it is quite difficult to compare Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time to Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels. There just isn’t that much commonality there.

Series like The Lord of the Rings or the Wheel of Time are epic in scope. They tell one story, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. But that one story does not fit in one book: it has to be spread across multiple volumes. The vast majority of these epic series simply cannot be read on a standalone basis (for a great counter-example, see my review of N.K Jemisin’s The Broken Kingdoms).

If you look at an episodic series like Butcher’s Dresden Files or Connolly’s Twenty Palaces novels, the series itself has a very different structure. Each book is a completely self-contained story, with its own beginning and ending that can be read independently of the other books in the series. And in contemporary series, each book and the entire series focuses on the experiences of one particular character.

Building an Episodic Character

In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, series like Terry Brooks’ Shannara series, Anne McCaffery’s Dragonriders of Pern, and Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books were structured around a single universe (Shannara, Pern, and Valdemar, respectively) with standalone trilogies (or duologies) of books set within that universe. Each standalone sub-series could be described as an “epic” sub-series, while if we take the entire oevre together they begin to resemble episodic series. However, following the late ’90s’ rise of “Chihuahua-killer” fantasy tomes, these types of episodic/epic series seem to have vanished from publishers’ new lists.

With the contemporary focus on one character, that character becomes the most important aspect of an episodic series. This is true whether we’re writing an adult urban fantasy series like the Twenty Palaces, a paranormal romance mystery (à la Charlaine Harris), or a middle-grade adventure series (like Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl). Of course, character matters in every book. But it is the foundation of any episodic series.

What would Sherlock Holmes be without Sherlock Holmes? Could we have the Dresden Files without Harry Dresden? Or the Sookie Stackhouse novels without Sookie? The identity of the series’ protagonist is intrinsically tied up with the identify of the series. Few people realize that the Sookie Stackhouse novels were in fact first dubbed the “Southern Vampires Mysteries”: the pervasive character of their protagonist eventually subsumed the publisher’s attempts to brand the series independently of its hero.

There is a lot of commonality in how episodic authors create their heroes. First, almost all episodic heroes have a Past (note the capital “P”). In many ways, this is a product of the history of episodic series, who are pretty clear descendants of the serialized mystery (Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, etc.). When we meet Connolly’s Ray Lilly, or when we meet Butcher’s Harry Dresden, or Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos each brings to the table a checkered history.

Ray Lilly is an ex-con who survived an unpleasant run-in with magic, and now finds himself employed as a “wooden man” (a sort of enforcer) for a society of wizards (called the “Twenty Palaces Society”). Harry Dresden is a professional wizard private investigator who has had serious altercations with magical society. Vlad Taltos is a low-ranking minority (human) criminal in a larger criminal organization on a magic-filled secondary world.

Each is in some fashion iconoclastic. They have survived altercations with some form of authority in their world, which gives them some form of reputation. This reputation becomes a double-edged sword that both helps and hinders the hero on their adventures. As the books unfold, the reader learns more of this backstory through subtly planted information, for the most part avoiding an infodump that would stall the fast pace of the story. As the series winds to a conclusion, the overarching conclusion likely leads to some resolution of the lingering effects of that backstory.

Every one of these characters is gainfully employed. What’s more, they have jobs that will force them into adventures. Lilly is an enforcer. Dresden is a wizard/private-eye. Taltos is a low-level crime boss/private-eye/assassin. It is their means of employment that makes a long, episodic series possible. A detective will always have another case. An enforcer will always have another assignment. An assassin will always have another target. This enforces a certain structure, along with certain strictures, on each book in the series.

When we meet the hero, they are often inexperienced in some critical aspect. Ray Lilly knows almost nothing about magic, save that it exists. Harry Dresden has lots of magical power, but very little control. Any middle-grade or young adult episodic series (like Artemis Fowl or The 39 Clues) has inexperienced heroes by default: youth and inexperience go hand-in-hand! The use of inexperience makes it possible for the reader to learn alongside the hero, and for the hero to progress through adventures (books) with escalating challenges. As the hero’s experience increases over the course of the series, the challenges that they face can become more difficult, more challenging, more dangerous. Done artfully, this keeps the tension high in the later books in the series, and if tied back to the character’s emotional development can keep the character engaging, whether we’re in book two or twelve.

The use of iconoclasm and employment are both traditional tools of the mystery novel. Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Miss Marple, even Sam Spade – all of the classic detectives were iconoclastic, and the vast majority were actively employed as detectives. The use of inexperience to provide character progression seems to be a newer development, and it is one that an increasing number of episodic series rely on.

NEXT: Come back on Saturday for the second installment for episodic plots, how to keep the reader reading in one book, and how to avoid flagging interest as the series progresses.

Dec 8

4 Comments

Where Do We Go from Here? Utopia in Contemporary Science Fiction

Over the weekend, science fiction author Charles Stross posted a call for more utopian speculation in contemporary science fiction. I was weaned on Huxley, Wells, Skinner, and Orwell, and so Charles’ call got me thinking: why has the utopian sub-genre fizzled out of style in the last fifty or so years? Why has the search for a good place (eutopia) ended up going no place (utopia)? (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun). I think the decline of utopian fiction is linked to the lack of a cogent utopian response to dystopian critique. What makes the dystopian critique so effective? How are the best dystopias constructed?

The Structures of Utopia and Dystopia

How to Make Perfection Entertaining

The vast majority of utopian fiction was written during the end of the industrial revolution (1880 – 1950), riding on the popularization of socialist philosophy in western Europe. Dystopias rose in parallel, although in far greater number due to their greater entertainment value. The brutal fact is that dystopias sell better than utopias because perfection makes it very hard for an author to introduce conflict.

Starting with Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, every piece of utopian fiction has been written like a travelogue. The reader follows a protagonist who comes from our imperfect society, and who enters (one way or another) the perfect society. Given this set up, it becomes almost impossible to introduce tension. Why would the visitor ever want to leave? What would the hero need to fight against? Conflict is out-moded in a utopia, and this makes storytelling very difficult.

The vast majority of utopian fiction appeals to logos first and pathos second, and it wasn’t until Heinlein, Le Guin, and Delaney that those priorities were revsered. In the 1960s and ’70s, authors like Robert A. Heinlein (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia), and Samuel R. Delany (Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia) introduced real conflict into their utopian plots. Each did this by throwing the utopia or its representatives (Heinlein’s anarcho-libertarian Luna, Le Guin’s collectivist Shevek/Anarres, Delany’s sex/gender heterotopia Triton) into armed conflict with a non-utopian society (Earth, Urras, and Earth respectively).

As Heinlein, Le Guin, and Delany made clear, the entertainment value of contemporary utopian fiction relies upon the relationship between the utopia and a different (possibly opposed) society. More recently, Iain M. Banks has done this to good effect in his Culture novels, where his protagonists tend to be Special Circumstances operatives (spies) interacting with non-utopian planets/societies/situations. While retaining some aspects of the travelogue, these books take a page out of Victor Hugo’s work and embody the utopian ideal into a principle character. Similarly, they then take the opposing viewpoint and embody that value system into a different character and let the two collide.

Le Guin effectively reversed the utopian travelogue structure: her hero Shevek is the collectivist utopian, but the world he visits (Urras) is the anti-thesis of his collectivist home planet. By making her visitor the utopian, she was able to explore more clearly the strengths and flaws of her collectivist/anarchist society and the opposed individualist/capitalist society. Delany does something similar by sending a visitor (Brom) whose values are inimical to those of the utopia he visits. This sets the stage for a gripping and powerful conflict between him and those he has relationships with, which is mirrored by the interplanetary conflict with Earth.

For those looking to write entertaining utopian fiction that has a hope of competing against dystopias, the lessons are deceptively simple:

Personify your value systems.
Play with perspective, by shifting which character is either narrating the story or the viewpoint character.
Focus on individual relationships, instead of on the philosophical ones.

Viva la Revolucion!

Dystopias, by contrast, are stories of revolution. An ostensibly perfect society is shown to be deeply flawed, hypocritical, unjust. Our hero – usually a died-in-the-wool believer at the story’s opening – realizes his perfect society is a lie and either brings the system down or escapes to a liberated area outside of the proscribed area. The conflict practically writes itself: the situation is dire (our hero is usually alone against oppressive odds), and the stakes are high (death, or worse: conversion).

Structurally, dystopias tend to be logical extrapolations of a central conceit, a conceit that tends to be tied to the philosophical, sociological, and economic concerns of the time:

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 classic We takes the early 20th century’s industrialization, Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon, and constructs a totalitarian world state where individuals are referred to only by number and any burgeoning individuality is earnestly squashed.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where the principles of assembly-line manufacturing are now applied to individuals, whose roles in life are rigidly determined based on their genetic engineering.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, directly inspired by Zamyatin’s work and extrapolating the concept of a society founded on the Panopticon.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which depicts censorship taken to a logical extreme.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron (published in Welcome to the Monkey House: Stories), which shows a state in which everyone is forced to be average in all aspects of their being.

Jack Vance’s Alastor trilogy, where each book explores a different society built around a particular social concept (respectively gambling, fuedalism, collectivism).

John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, which take show plausible consequences of Malthusian overpopulation and ecological collapse.

Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, which takes 1980’s Thatcherite politics and postulates a future based upon them.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which shows a society built on religious fundamentalism and male chauvinism.

James Morrow’s City of Truth, which posits a society founded upon (always) telling the truth.

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, which builds a society around providing the masses with “bread and circuses” (gladiatorial conflict) to keep them in line.

All of the examples listed above hinge upon a central character who comes to doubt the society they are a part of. Whether it is Bradbury’s Montag, or Morrow’s Jack Sperry, the protagonist is a product of the dystopian society who comes to vehemently oppose it. This opposition lends even early dystopias powerful conflict, rising tension, and thematic tension. Even the earlier dystopias established the pattern of embodying opposing principles in their characters. For every Winston Smith, we have an O’Brien (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). For every Bernard Marx and John the Savage, we have a Mustapha Mond (Huxley’s Brave New World). This gives the opposing philosophies a face, makes them personable and – in the case of Mustapha Mond, at least – deceptively sympathetic.

If utopian fiction has traditionally appealed to logos, and then pathos, then dystopian fiction has traditionally reversed that order. As a result, the success or failure of dystopian fiction lies in its world-building. The memorable dystopian works tend to have fully-realized characters, and conflict-prone plots that put their heroes in desperate situations philosophically and physically.

The Dystopian Critique of Utopia

If Charles Stross is looking for more utopian fiction, then he should be looking for more utopias that apply lessons from their dystopian cousins. By relying upon more three-dimensional characters, dystopian fiction better illustrates how flawed humans may react to situations and choices. “Human nature” is often cited as a criticism of utopian philosophy, and only the works of Heinlein, Le Guin, and Delaney have tried to respond to that criticism. Heinlein’s utopia takes the cynical, ultra-libertarian view of individualism and applies it. Le Guin readily admits to the flaws in her utopia, and posits that society as an aspirational work-in-progress reliant upon the ethos of its inhabitants. Delaney shows that any utopia is indelibly based upon a shared value system, and elements which “don’t fit in” may or may not have a place within that society…even if by ostensible definition, it is an all-encompassing, all-permitting society.

These are not the techniques of H.G. Wells or earlier utopian authors. They are instead the techniques of dystopian fiction, applied to utopian concepts. And if we are to look for modern-day utopian fiction, we should try to write more books that attempt the same. Thinly-veiled imperative lectures (à la Wells or Morris) would not sell today, and though well-written utopian travelogues (like Michal Ajvaz’s The Golden Age) may win awards and earn respect, they are extremely difficult to get right. I also suspect there is limited demand for them.

If we want to see contemporary utopian fiction, one option is to take a page out of Iain M. Banks’ playbook: establish the utopia in the far-distant future, so far removed as to make it effectively fait accomplit, then use Le Guin’s tactic of taking a dyed-in-the-wool utopian and putting them in conflict/interaction with opposing viewpoints. It’s a technique that works for the most-recent utopias, whether Iain M. Banks’ Culture or the Star Trek Federation. While this technique makes for compelling reading, but the fact that there are few “new” types of utopia limits the potential thematic impact.

Another option is to do as John C. Wright does in his Golden Age trilogy. There, the author takes a page out of the dystopian playbook: he uses a dyed-in-the-wool utopian character to uncover the flaws in his own utopia. Whereas in a truly dystopian work, that hero would then go on to either destroy or escape his society, Wright’s hero instead tries to save his society despite its flaws. Structurally, this is probably the most interesting utopian fiction I have seen in many years. While the utopia itself is of the nearly-ubiquitous individualist/anarchist mold, the technique by which Wright explores his themes is quite refreshing.

A third – and perhaps most challenging – option is to actually come up with some fresh utopian philosophies. In many ways, utopian philosophy has become almost synonymous with either libertarian anarchy or collectivist anarchy, and I question whether there is much more to be said on either subject. Instead, perhaps we should come up with some new models for looking at society, for structuring our relationships. If we do that, then we should apply the structural lessons of dystopian fiction to make the characters compelling, the plots full of conflict, and fundamentally resonant.

One possibility which I see is for utopian fiction that actually precedes the utopia itself. Utopia is – by definition – a static place. But the process of building a utopia, whatever its value system, surely is not. Why not utopian fiction that is directly aspirational? The reality of watching a utopia be built might be like the making of law and sausages: best left unwatched. But if we’re dealing with fiction, then I’m sure we can squeeze some entertainment and thematic resonance out of the struggle for a better world. After all, once that struggle is won, we’ll have no more conflict to write about.

Nov 17

3 Comments

The Difference Between Writing a Short Story and a Novel

So I finished writing my first novel last night. Typing it out like that makes it sound a lot more impressive than it actually is. It’s the first draft of an eighty-three thousand word fantasy novel, and is my first attempt at anything longer than a short story since I was twelve years old. Now, I’m going to put it aside for several weeks, work on other things, and then return to re-write it, and then maybe I’ll dance a little jig. Maybe. We’ll see how I feel about the finished product in a couple of months. But since this is NaNoWriMo, I thought it might be interesting to share some thoughts on how the process of writing this particular novel differed from my earlier experiences writing short stories.

DISCLAIMER: The experiences I’m describing here relate to this particular novel, and to me as a writer. Many of these experiences would not translate to a different novel with a different structure, and a different set of challenges. They might not translate to anyone else’s approach to writing, either. For that matter, I’m also new at this. This is my first novel, and so the observations and methods that worked for this one might be trashed by the time I’m on my sixth. So take anything you read here with a grain of salt, as I’m kind of making it up as I go.

Why I Write Short Stories, or Why I Didn’t Write Novels

At some point, I got it into my head that short stories demand tighter writing than novels do. I figured that if I could get my short story technique down, then when I applied my craft to the longer form, it would be better, faster, stronger. So in the last two years, I finished about fifty short stories, ranging in length from 1,300 words to 7,000 words. Mostly fantasy, spanning a variety of types from fairy tales, to (the very rare) sword and sorcery, some horror, and some mainstream literary stuff. I looked at it as good practice for when I started writing novels, and I definitely think that it helped me to write the novel in a number of ways:

1	Short stories are short enough to experiment with.	Lots of people argue that writing exercises are a good way to practice, but somehow I’m always disappointed if I do a writing exercise that does not yield a fully functional story. I think of it like whipping up some pancake batter for the practice, then chucking it without putting it in the pan. It’s helpful, sure; but finishing something delicious is more so. Even if you write slowly, churning out a 2,000 word short story will take you far less than an 80,000 or 100,000 word novel – which makes them a great way to build confidence and develop skills, without the danger of discovering you’ve written yourself into a corner at 60,000 words.
2	Short stories have fewer moving parts.	As I talked about in an earlier post, short stories just don’t have the room for a lot of complexity. This makes them easier to disassemble than a novel. I find that I can take a short story apart, look at all of the pieces that it’s composed of, and then re-assemble it differently, or fix a broken element, much faster than if I had to do that in a novel. It also makes it easier to learn the craft of plotting, or how characters get built, or how world-building works, than in a novel. I kind of think of it like learning architecture from LEGO’s, before moving onto bricks.
3	Short stories can teach you how to schedule productive writing time.	I’ve got a full-time day job, I do volunteer work, I have a social life. Carving out time for writing is painful. But if I want to set a self-imposed deadline upon myself (e.g. “Write a novel by the end of the year”), I need to use an awareness of how quickly I write to schedule around it. That’s just the way my schedule, and my scheduling approach, works. Writing short stories taught me to think before I write. I learned to think through many different aspects of a story, starting from the voice, the plot, the characters, the setting, etc. By thinking (sometimes for weeks or months) before I ever write a single word lets me actually write the story extremely quickly once I do sit down. I know not everyone works this way. But with my schedule, it is easier to find time to think (shower, car, lying awake in bed) than it is to find time to actually write. So producing short stories trained me to think first, and then when I’ve thought it through enough, to sit down and write quickly.
4	Editorial Feedback	Writing is all about waiting. You write something, ship it off to agents, editors, and someday (six months later if you’re lucky) somebody gets back to you with a response. In the novel market, my understanding is that it is almost always a form rejection. Thankfully, the professional (and semi-pro) short fiction markets have a faster turn-around. Taking what I considered my best short stories, I could expect a response in several weeks, rather than months. As my writing improved, I could see changes in the responses: fewer and fewer form letters, editors offering reasons (sometimes precise, sometimes not) on why a story didn’t work for them. This was enormously helpful. It helped focus my attention on what needed work in my writing, taught me to deal constructively with rejections (a vital skill for any aspiring writer), and gave me confidence that my hard work was paying off. By writing and trying to sell shorts, I was able to go through multiple feedback iterations in the same time it would have taken me to write a single 100,000 novel.

Novels Are Not Short Stories

Getting Ready to Write

But novels are not short stories. I usually write short stories in a two step process: I think about them enough to develop a narrative voice, identify my principal character, perhaps identify the general mood for the story. It’s the act of actually disciplining my imagination, and sometimes it can take five minutes or it can take weeks. But once this step is done, I can sit down and write the first draft of the story in a couple of hours. I don’t outline, I don’t take notes. I just write the story and then revise it after the fact.

I knew that this approach wouldn’t work for a novel. Structurally, it’s just too big: too many characters, too many side-plots, too many moving parts to figure them out in my head before sitting down to write. So I adopted a different approach. So I started by taking some notes. Not an outline, something a lot simpler. I started with my premise (“How a world built on magic responds to the invention of the printing press”). The world of my story would start from this premise. With a premise like that, I knew the conflict would be between groups in the society, and between specific characters within those groups. So I started by sketching a paragraph of notes about different groups in this society: their histories, their motivations, their value systems, etc. This didn’t let me identify any characters, yet, but it did allow me to sketch a basic plot. Each group would have to respond somehow to the printing press. And so these responses formed my high-level, basic plot outline. With that premise, with the social outline, the basic skeleton of a plot, I was able to (preliminary) identify my characters: after all, someone would have to actually do whatever the groups’ responses would be. I hadn’t had to do this kind of outlining for any of my short stories. They were simpler, with less complex relationships, and less complex conflicts. But if I hadn’t done this, I don’t think I would have found a way to actually start my novel.

Starting to Write

The first 17,000 words (20% of the finished draft) were very hard. I must have written the first several chapters five or six times before I was happy with them. I started with close third person, switched to first, swapped the point in my (very general) timeline where the story began once or twice, and changed a bunch of my initial character outlines. Getting past these false starts was the hardest part in actually writing the book.

In terms of my actual writing, I wrote each chapter as if it were a movement in a short story. When I write short stories, if I’m writing the beginning I’m already thinking about what needs to happen in the middle. By the time I’m working on the middle, I’m thinking about the end. I tried to do the same thing with chapters: while I was writing one chapter, I would be thinking about what needed to happen in the next. Characters would act in the “current” chapter, and what would follow could only be a logical continuation (a response) of that action, or a sidestep to establish a new side-plot.

At this stage, I didn’t have any kind of real plot outline. The focus was on setting the stage, establishing characters and side-plots. It was hard work to write each chapter, to set up the dominoes. But the next chapter would be that much easier to write, because by the time I had gotten there, I had narrowed down the places where I could go. Once I had set up one row of dominoes, I had limited where others could go if I wanted them to fall in sequence.

Getting over the Hump

The next 40,000 words (20 – 67% of the finished work) got much easier much faster. That’s not to say they were easy (they weren’t), but they did begin to flow easier. However, as the number of established side plots grew, I decided to get much more systematic in the writing. I actually made an outline, of sorts. It was an Excel worksheet, with one row for each chapter. Each row had four columns:

The chapter number,
The version number of my preferred draft for that chapter,
The word count of that chapter, and;
A couple of sentences summarizing the events of that chapter.

I had never needed anything like this for short stories, but this became an invaluable tool for me while writing the middle of the book. It allowed me to keep track of characters, events, pacing, and side-plots. The outline actually laid a road map for me as I wrote, because I was able to outline six or seven chapters ahead of my current place. As I wrote, I would revise the outline. I would decide to shift events to earlier (or later) chapters, and would revise as I went. But I didn’t actually extend the outline until I achieved certain key plot milestones in my writing.

During this phase of the writing, I was able to build a rhythm for the writing. While I couldn’t find the time to write every day (unfortunately), I was able to find a rhythm that let me write about 10,000 words a week, which struck me as a perfectly good rate if I could maintain it throughout the novel. The biggest trouble I ran into during this phase was my narrative voice. By the time I had written 20,000 words, I was certain I had lost my narrative voice somewhere around 10,000 words. I chose not to go back and revise. Instead, I chose to keep writing (trying to regain my original voice), and to focus particular attention on it when I re-wrote the book after it was done.

Whether this was a good choice or not, I don’t know. Whether my fear was real or not, I don’t know. I won’t know until after I have let the story sit for a couple of weeks and return to the re-write with a fresh mind.

Rushing to the End

By the time I had written 55,000 words, I had enough (plot) visibility to outline the last 20 chapters of the book. During this phase, my focus was on maintaining momentum and executing on the outline I had put together. I actually accelerated my writing pace during this phase, as if it were a sprint to the finish line. That may or may not have weakened the actual writing, but I also realize I am still too close to the story to judge that accurately. That goes onto the list of things to pay special attention to during the re-write.

As I neared the end, I also started to plan out the next phase: the re-write itself. I know that I’ll have to revisit the entire book. I know that before I do that, I’ll have to put it aside for several weeks, if not several months. I’ll work on something else, put it out of my mind, and only then return to the re-write. When I do start the re-write, I have a list of issues that I know I need to address. Some are major, functional issues (narrative voice). Others are problems that I know I need to fix (background that I came up with mid-way into the book, which I should have established early on). Or still others are thoughts I might have to put more meat on the book’s bones, since 83,000 words is a little light for a debut novel (most genre editors seem to seek 80 – 110k). But before I do any of that, I need to gain some distance from the book. Put the plot, the world, the characters from my mind so that I can look at it fresh.

Moving Beyond the First Novel

So now that I have finished my first novel-length work, there are two major things on my mind: first, the fact that most first novels become an author’s embarrassing baby photo. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a multiple-book author who loves the first book they ever published. Usually, they seem to prefer their later (more experienced, mature) works for a variety of reasons. And I’ve heard too many stories of authors whose first (or first several) books collect dust in some desk drawer, never seeing the light of day. That’s probably not unlike my first short stories, and I would not be at all surprised if my first novel joins them. I am perfectly comfortable with that. Even if this book never sells, I know that I have written it and I have learned a lot about writing through the process. Probably the most important lesson is that I can write novel-length works, which is worth a lot. And is also one of the points of NaNoWriMo (even if this wasn’t a NaNoWriMo book, I still think NaNoWriMo is a great initiative for startup authors).

Which brings me to the second thing on my mind: writing my second novel. I’ve already got it well underway. This one is more ambitious, more complicated, and a bit more difficult (stylistically and thematically) than the novel I just finished. I’m already about 25,000 words into it, and I am well into its middle. It has a very different structure, and practically inverses the challenges of my first novel. Either way, I’m having fun writing it and I think it will be a good way to clear my first novel from my mind…in time to return to my first book in December for a re-write.

So if you’re a writer reading this blog post, or if you want to be, what do you think about the differences between writing a novel and short stories? What have your experiences been? There are probably about as many methodologies and lessons to be learned as there are writers, so I’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts.

by Chris Gerwel