How to Write Shorter Works Successfully

THE SORCERESS QUEEN AND THE PIRATE ROGUE comes out April 19! This is Book Two in Heirs of Magic, and you can preorder a copy at the links below or via my website. :-)

   

This week at the SFF Seven, we're examining the differences between writing a short story, novella, novel, series. We're asking each other: Do you prepare for length beforehand or edit down (or add new stuff) afterward?

So, I have Strong Opinions about this. Something that may come as a surprise to exactly none of you. 

I am primarily a novelist now and the shortest works I write are novellas that are typically no less than 25K words. (My novels range from 90K-120K.) When I first started writing, I wrote essays and short stories. My first book - Wyoming Trucks, True Love, and the Weather Channel - was an essay collection. Writing those shorter lengths came naturally to me from work in school. 

When I transitioned to writing novels, it was MUCH more difficult than I expected. I had this idea that it would be like writing a really long essay. 

Reader: it was not. 

I had to learn the rhythm and pacing of a novel, which feels like an entirely different art form than writing novellas or shorts. Because... it is. It's a common error for an author to attempt to stretch a short story concept into a novel. Readers notice that the story feels "thin," stretched out for too long, and filled with stuff that's boring because it's unnecessary. Or, sometimes, a story that's novel-length gets wedged into a shorter format. Then it feels rushed, over too soon, and never fully explored.

So, my answer is that I *always* prepare for length beforehand. The story concept MUST fit the planned length. It's a matter of choosing a story with the correct scope for that length. Shorter works have fewer secondary characters and more straightforward conflicts. Very short works should explore a single idea. One surefire way to confine a story to a shorter length is to have it take place over a much shorter span of time. For example, my novella, THE LONG NIGHT OF THE CRYSTALLINE MOON, which is the prequel to Heirs of Magic, takes place over the course of a single night. This helps to make up for the fact that I have a lot of secondary characters - more than any other novella I've written. It wasn't ideal, but I made that choice because I was introducing a new series.

Naturally, there are no actual rules. Or, if there are, they're made to be broken. But I do think that adding or deleting to winnow a novel into a short, or fattening up a short to make it a novel, almost never works. 

The Dead WIP File

 

Ah, the cemetery of dead works. The gravestones list and limp far into the distance. Some mark the resting places of stray ideas that never had a chance to mature. Others memorialize stories and characters that almost made it. Some stones stand guard over the ones that never stood a chance. 

Occasionally, in keeping with the philosophy that nothing is ever wasted, I take my shovel into the damp night and rob a grave. Metaphorically, of course, because really, it's just a question of searching some computer files. The thing is, I almost never resurrect a corpse, dress it up, and then teach it to sing 'Putting on the Ritz'. Instead, I slice the heart, guts, or brain out of the poor dead thing and transplant the organ(s) into whichever patient is on my table at the time. 

Situations. Snippets of dialogue. Whatever suits the more viable subject being stitched together. Mad scientists and evil geniuses should only ever plagiarize themselves, in my view. And then, only once. One heart cannot be sliced in half and shared between two patients if you expect either to live. 

Thining back across the stories in my files, the only time I resurrected the dead, the story was only mostly dead. With a little magic called 'a competent editor', that story didn't just walk, it grew wings. Maybe it is all dressed up and singing 'Putting on the Ritz'. 

When writers play necromancer

To my mind, stories are live things: growing, maturing, twisting, warming hearts, and chilling spines. Sometimes, sadly, they die young. Sometimes they die young for a reason. And sometimes necromancer writers try to bring them back.

I did that once: there was a submission call for an anthology of short stories that should be both high fantasy and erotica. I thought, well, I used to write a whole bunch of salacious Tolkien fanfiction, so I got this, right. I promptly dug up a fic that never quite worked and started re-jiggering it. And jiggered some more. And ditched the beginning. And the ending. Changed the protag. Changed the magic system. Rewrote the whole thing so that the brand new magic system was the central pivot. Redid the ending because of some notes from the antho editor. By that point, my story was more a Frankenstein monster of fresh bits of flesh than it was a whole zombie of that dead fic. Now when I look at the thing, I can't even see traces of the original. 

I've never tried to resurrect a dead story since then, though I've wanted to many times. I think little bits -- the good bits, I hope! -- sneak into current projects, and of course no writing is ever wasted because it is all good practice. Fail fast, as they say in corporatelandia.

But yeah, I'm not the person you want to talk to when you're thinking about re-imagining that book you gave up on years ago, 'cause I kind of failed at that.

Resurrecting the Dead WiP

Have I ever resurrected an old project? How much of the original did I keep? 

Funny you should ask. As I'm wrapping up my current WiP, I'm eyeing an old WiP whose conceit works, characters hold up,  plot...not so much. When I wrote this WiP fifteen years ago, I wasn't a plotter. I was a pantser, and the meandering of the story reflects why I no longer write without a plan. Dear reader, it is bad, so bad. While writing this WiP, I distinctly remember wondering how the big-time authors of SFF knew what scenes to leave in and what to exclude (it's called a plot, dummy). Needless to say, I wouldn't dream of publishing the WiP as-is. Currently, it's a 275k high fantasy elemental assassin story that goes too far in some aspects and not far enough in others while leaving lots of "uh, what?" moments.

Fortunately, the more I write, the better I get (at least I like to believe that). I've published seven books (soon to be eight) since then. Theoretically, I might maybe be able to salvage the settings, the magic system, the characters, and the GMC of the protagonist. The story itself? Total rewrite.

~shushes the other unpublished books locked in the trunk 

and buried in the yard, never to be seen again~

Bring Out Your dead!

 This week's subject is Resurrecting Old Projects: Do you start from scratch or work what you have?

The answer for me is: It depends on what I have. If it's a sentence or two, and it often is, I'm basically stat=rting from scratch and springboarding off of what I stat=rted with. if it's half a novel, I'm going to save as much as I can, u less it truly, epically sucks wind. 

I've done both. 

I once lost 40,000 words of a novel project to a computer crash. The entire file just vanished, never to be found again. Yeah, that particular story has stayed dead, but parts of it have been cannibalized for other projects. 

There are always challenges. the catch is deciding whether or n9t that moldering corpse in the corner of y9urmind is bugging you because you need to bring it back to life, or just because you let it die in the first place. Does it really haunt you Or is that just guilt?

Mostly I pick the meat from the bones and start from scratch.

Your mileage may vary.

Religion: Balm, Benign, or Bane

Did you ever spend the night with a friend when you were a kid and that friend's family went to church services every Sunday when yours didn't? Your friend's family just automatically assumed you'd go to church with them. Why not? You got to hang with your bestie a little longer. 

And then you walked into the alien landscape of someone else's beliefs and rituals. This worked, too, if your family went to a Baptist church and your friend was Catholic. The two traditions are vaguely similar, but the details will really catch you unaware. 

Religion is such a great way to convey stranger in a strange land in a story. I love playing with it for that reason. With a single religious scene or reference, my characters can show you that they are wholly invested in a culture, utterly alienated from that culture, or wondering what the heck is up with the culture. In science fiction, there's even more fun to be had. Religions can (and do when left to me) reflect a broad range of sentient beings - not all of which are humanoids. Humans want to look into the face of a human-looking god. Why wouldn't a species of sentient spiders want to focus all of their eyes upon the face of a spider god? I get to bend morality, too. We humans speak of morality as if it's absolute - when it's probably relative based on how your species evolved. Take food, for example. Humans are omnivores. We can, and do, eat just about anything. We attach some morality to food - animals we eat shouldn't suffer. But what if your species evolved from cats? The hunt might be a religious experience. An obligate carnivore eating a kill would probably be a high holy event. How long you could toy with your prey without killing it might be a form of prayer. Yet if your species base evolved from herbivores, predators would be demonized and plants would probably figure in the liturgy.

For most of my books, religion is a backdrop, a way of reinforcing that we're not in Kansas anymore. Most of my characters are only interested in religion from the standpoint that they use a lot of blasphemy when swearing. Edie's from a fundamentalist religious settlement (Enemy Storm) and she offers hints of cultural differences, but the religion doesn't drive the story. It does heighten conflict in that I used it in that book to draw a comparison between who Edie had been and who Edie has become. 

In book four, religion becomes a bigger thing. A much bigger thing. The heroine, Ildri Bynovan is a once in a century religious leader - think of the Pope or the Dali Lama. And while she's lost some of her personal faith, she strongly believes that religion is mostly benign, sometimes a bane, and in rare shining moments, a balm. She's in it to bring more of the balm to the members of the various churches under her care. Of course, the hero wants to use her to assassinate someone, so I'm sure they'll get along well.

Religion in my stories (and an excerpt!)

You know how polite social discussion should always avoid politics or religion? Well, we're kind of blowing that up on SFF Seven this week. We are talking about the R word. Religion. Specifically, we're talking about religion's place in story and how -- or if -- we use religion to drive story arcs.

And to that I answer, yes. Even if we don't call it religion, every good character has a moral code. One of my favorite examples of that is the character Amos in The Expanse (book series and tv show). He comes right out and says early on that there are three types of people: those you follow, those you protect, and those you kill. And then the rest of the series is how he sorts folks into those pails and what it takes to move someone from one pail to another. He never mentions gods or faith or anything like that, but his sorting system is a religion, and he's so consistent in applying it that it makes for fascinating character interactions and interior growth.

In my cyberpunk romance series that begins with Wanted and Wired, the setting is mid-21st-century, so it's close enough that the characters all have recognizable religious affiliations. Most are secularists, but a few -- notably Kellen, the animal lover and all-around good guy -- have vestigial Christianity clinging to them. This presents as his easy ability to have faith, both in people and in phenomena, and it puts him at odds with his true love Angela, who is evangelically secular and maybe even a little hostile to all religion. I tried to play with that push and pull and come out with a "see, we can all get along without anybody having to lose their individual essence" conclusion. Not sure if I succeeded, but that was definitely in my mind when I was writing.

Religion is a little trickier in the world I'm writing right now, because it's set in the far future when humanity is an interstellar civilization. Their religions, therefore, should be less recognizable, and I don't want to just set up easy analogs for the current major religions and go from there. Instead I've tried to develop religions that would, I think, make sense to these highly technological people. To do that, I've looked at historical rise and fall of religions and discovered that we tend to develop religion as a response to phenomena that we know a little bit about, are impressed by or fear, and hope will not harm us. So my starfaring folk of the future literally worship the stars and the vast, mysterious space between. I think it makes for some fun dynamics with my characters:

Just before fitting the tube to his mouth, Ash caught her gaze and smiled. Not an intimidating smile at all and quite friendly even. Also loaded with memories, all of which hit her at once. How very unfair. Memories should not make one want to weep.

“Stars’ breath to you, Hestia,” he said.

The words were an aphorism based on the fanciful notion that benevolent stars literally breathed travelers across the void on drifts of grace and interstellar radiation. That wasn’t how faster-than-light travel worked. Honestly, no human knew precisely how it worked. Only the vast computer System, which controlled travel and most everything else, really knew. Without the System, people would be unable to travel between planets, no less between stars. But people didn’t like to be reminded of their required subservience to machines, and also the species was as a whole given to poetics, so they made up these stories about stars breathing and such. People being people, she guessed, reached for comfort where they could.

Still. No one had wished her stars’ breath at the outset of a voyage in … well, a long time. She was startled by how un-alone it made her feel, but this time in a good way. Too good, drat him.

“Same to you,” she managed before the lid of her berth hissed shut.

The Religion of Character Development

Does religion change/determine the course of a story?

Uh, for the characters? Sure. Assuming religion is defined as devotion to a fixed set of beliefs, then all my stories deal with religion. It could be argued that character development is the discovery, testing, and confirmation or change in said beliefs. Whether there are greater entities involved in those belief systems and whether there are formalized mass followings varies. 

In my Fire Born series, there are five gods who are actively and visibly involved in the lives of their creations. How those gods are worshipped forms the structures of the five different societies. Naturally, the protagonist comes along to shake those beliefs to their core, sometimes shattering them and sometimes reshaping them as her own beliefs and values are tested and changed.

In my Immortal Spy series, gods, fates, angels, and dragons are the ruling class. Jokes abound about pillars of real-world mass religions. 

Now, if you're wondering if my personal beliefs prevent or permit me to write characters, plots, and settings in certain ways, I would say they permit me and never prevent me. As an author, if you can't or won't examine systems of belief through the eye of fiction, then you might need to rethink what kind of stories you're telling. Are your characters being challenged? Are they on a journey? Stuff's bound to happen that makes them question who they are, how they're doing things, why they're doing them--regardless of whether the protag realizes or admits it--it should be obvious to the reader. That's character development. That is the religion of storytelling.