The difference between writing short stories and novels (part 1)

I haven’t written a short story in a long time. So long, I may have only had two kids last time I finished one.

Instead, I’ve been working on a couple of novels.

Now, you can interpret “working” in whichever way you see fit, but I’ll fess up right now: I’ve been disgusted and horrified with my progress on them.

Let me elaborate for a minute. I haven’t been screwing around or wasting the tiny amount of time I have available to throw at this writing thing, but I’m just not seeing any results.

Maybe it’s just because we didn’t have kids yet at the time, but when I wrote Holy Fudgesicles, I just…I don’t know….I just wrote it. Most of it was done during a NaNoWriMo competition, but I just got it done. I was able to work on revisions and queries while continuing to write and submit short stories.

But now it’s different. I’m trying to write novels again, and instead of watching that word count climb, I keep jumping from thing to thing.

There are four novels I’ve gone back and forth with in the last year, and here’s what’s been happening. (Also, don’t worry, my reasoning for this is follows.)

Attempted Book One:

I spent a whole bunch of time planning an epic fantasy trilogy, creating character profiles and town/region descriptions. I created a rough outline of the first book and a general page-length summary of the next two.

Then I started writing the first scene. And to be honest, it just wasn’t working. The scope of the story was just way too big. There was just too much going on and to make matters worse, I absolutely hated the voice of what I had written so far. It just had too much “Jason Bougger” in it. It just didn’t sound “epic fantasy” enough.

So I put it on hold and decided it can be my “after I make it” trilogy and moved on, backwards in time to….

Attempted Book Two:

So this a YA Fantasy novel I’ve struggled with for a long time. I have a 50k+ first draft, but it needs work. Lots and lots of work, and another 20,000 words of world-buliding and character depth.

But what’s the problem with it? Gosh, everything. The villain needs a purpose, an origin, a personality, and a general overhaul on everything else. The characters, while easily differential, are a group of white teens from the Midwest. They work well for the story, but not for the target audience (by “target audience” I mean “literary agents”).

There are also a whole bunch of major plot holes and the world-building is very limited. Every time I get to work on revising this thing, I get overwhelmed and end up just putting it away and starting work on…

Attempted Book Three:

This is a YA horror novel. I have a half-way decent outline of it, and have written the first couple of scenes. The main protagonist is a sixteen-year-old girl, so this is certainly something new for me to try. While that does may bring some challenges, it’s manageable.

Where I’m struggling is with point-of-view. My outline is that main protagonist’s story arc. The problem is there are a lot things happening outside of her POV. Enough maybe that I need to a few more POV characters. That’s neither good, nor bad, but it does dramatically change the story and how I’m going about writing it.

It may even change the category from YA to general horror. If the story is told only from the POV of the teen, I’ll write it first-person and market it as YA horror. But if a group of other characters are “promoted” to POV characters, the tense automatically changes to limited third, and at that point I’d probably adjust the voice and target a broader horror audience instead of a young adult audience.

Either way, I put this one on hold also to think about it while I currently work on…

Attempted Book Four:

This is the novel I’m currently working on and it’s almost a compromise of the other attempted books. This one is the first books of a dark fantasy trilogy. It “fixes” some of the problems I listed above. For example, since I felt like I lacked an “epic fantasy” voice, with this one I can write in my typical “horror” voice, but throw it into a fantasy world.

I’ve got a few characters profiled and the scope of the story (at least in this first book) is much more manageable than in the epic fantasy I was planning.

So, this is what I’m currently working on. The word count isn’t climbing as well as I’d like it to, but progress is being made.

But what does any of this have to do with writing short stories?

And that brings us to the point of this post. When I wrote short stories, I would just sit down and discovery write them. And that was that.

Writing a novel is such a different process for me. The pre-writing, for example, required for a novel was essentially non-existent when I was writing short stories. I also wrote Holy Fudgesicles pretty much the same way I wrote short stories.

Writing a novel requires much more of an emotional investment than a short story as well. You have to be motivated to write it, otherwise it won’t get written. You can often finish a short story in a weekend; if not, it’s not a big deal to re-read what you’ve got and go back to it later.

With a novel, you have to be committed to working on it nearly every day and thinking about it all the time. The words won’t write themselves, so you have to dedicate time every day to writing new words. And if you need to take a break, make it a short one, because if you haven’t taken a lot of notes or didn’t do a lot of pre-writing, stepping away (and forgetting things) will only result in you wasting time redoing what you’ve already done.

So that’s it for the emotional side of writing novels. Tomorrow we’ll look at some of the specifics of why the process of writing is so different between a short story and a novel, so check back tomorrow, and in the meantime get some words written.

Are you a short story writer working on your first novel? How has the process been for you?  Leave a comment and let us know!