Break off the Short Story mindset, or embrace it?

NykeYoung · Oct 23, 2008

My WIP, V/A, in a sentence: "A man and a woman, both with supernatural abilities, take odd, lucrative jobs dealing with the local crime family and/or other supernatural beings to pay off bills and a huge tab, until one of them is kidnapped, and the other comes with the calvary to the rescue."

In V/A, there's an episodic nature to the first half. The heroes get a job or other complication to deal with. The heroes accomplish job or deal with the complication. Lather, rinse, repeat. The jobs are mostly simple "Get the MacGuffin from point A to point B" deals.

The problem is that I'm mentally thinking of them as separate stories. Sure it's nice when I can't think of anything for one sub-story. I'll just work on another sub-story and come back to it later.

The thing is, when one of these sub-stories goes wrong, I feel like correcting it then and there, when I probably should be working on completing the novel as a whole beforehand.

So, should I treat V/A as a collection of short stories (at least for the first half) and try polishing up each episode, or should I treat V/A as any other novel and stop trying to fix the past segments?

(Before someone suggests it, I'm thinking against extending the episodes to their own books. I would have to complicate the jobs, and I'd have to up the competence level for the heroes to match. At that point, I'd have a harder time establishing them as unemployed at the beginning of the mess. If I fix that, the story stops being the V/A I imagined.)

Stunted · Oct 23, 2008

What you're describing doesn't sound like a standard novel, but it still seems like it could work. So long as each "episode" is different, I say leave it how it is.

Phot's Moll · Oct 23, 2008

Some writers feel they must get each section or chapter just right before continuing, others prefer to get the whole thing down quickly and look at the details later. Do whichever works best for you.

Willowmound · Oct 23, 2008

A novel is not a short story. It has a different rhythm, a different structure. If you are writing a novel, I would suggest trying to write it as a novel -- not in episodes, but as one whole.

Charlie Horse · Oct 23, 2008

If you can find a way to tie them all in at the end, then you have a novel. Otherwise, it's a string of shorts.

tehuti88 · Oct 23, 2008

I would write them as a novel, not as separate short stories, myself, because I have to agree that short stories and novels are two completely different things and should be treated as such. That doesn't mean you can't edit/modify things as you go along, since that's how I work, but I wouldn't treat each part as a separate episode or else the longer work might end up really patchy sounding--like a collection of short stories and not a novel.

Phaeal · Oct 23, 2008

Read Orson Scott Card's article about switching from short stories to novels, "How to Make a Short Story Long." It appears in his How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

His premise is that the novel is not a short story stretched out or a series of short stories shoehorned together but an integral whole. To succeed, the novel needs to have through-threads or arcs running through it from start to finish; its segments need to be intimately interrelated.

In your case, the series of capers would need not to stand alone but to serve as rising steps toward a culmination of promise and a climax of tension. With each new caper, the MCs should get stronger, learn, change. Their relationship to each other should also evolve, as well as their relations to the world around them. Conflict should deepen and complexify. Stakes should get higher, obstacles more daunting.

A image might help. Aim not to line up a dozen blocks (episodes) but to braid together a dozen threads of incident and character, theme and imagery. Blocks can be knocked apart. A strong rope will hold together and guide the reader through the work.

Aschenbach · Oct 23, 2008

NykeYoung said:
In V/A, there's an episodic nature to the first half. The heroes get a job or other complication to deal with. The heroes accomplish job or deal with the complication. Lather, rinse, repeat. The jobs are mostly simple "Get the MacGuffin from point A to point B" deals.

From your description it sounds as if each episode is structurally identical, with only surface details changing. If this is the case it will get repetitive (and boring) very quickly. It would be like a novel repeating its opening scene over and over, with a few changes; what I want to see is progression.

I think it would be better to make each episode affect the one that follows in a meaningful way, rather than write episodes as seperate units.

kuwisdelu · Oct 23, 2008

As much as the short story and the novel are completely different beasts, an episodic plot is a perfectly acceptable way to structure a longer work. Just look at The Odyssey.

I think it depends on what you want to do. Are you comfortable with the episodic structure, or do you want something more traditional? If you like it how it is, then go for it. It's possible it'll be a harder sell (but not necessarily), but if it feels right, don't let that stop you. And don't worry about editing each "episode" as you go--I can't even get from scene to scene without making sure each is as perfect as I can get it.

OremLK · Oct 23, 2008

You always want at least one overarching plot that cables together the entire story and runs through everything in it. Kuwisdelu above mentioned The Odyssey. This is the perfect example, really. Despite being very episodic, every part of the story is also a part of Odysseus' journey home. It begins when he leaves and ends when he gets home (and returns it to a state where it is home).

The last novel I read was John Scalzi's Old Man's War. Great debut novel, and fairly episodic itself. But the episodes are causally related and also each important to the overarching story, which I think is about the protagonist's transformation of his role in life from civilian to soldier. There are subplots that run through the novel as well.

The point I'm getting at is this: It's entirely okay to be episodic in your approach, but you do need a main plot. One thing I like to do is to make the plot revolve around the characters' goals and then each episode is one step toward accomplishing them; that step may be encapsulated so much as to be an "episode", an individual subplot in one chapter, but each is part of the character's overall attempt to reach his goal.

Break off the Short Story mindset, or embrace it?

NykeYoung

Whoo! V/A Done!

Stunted

Ich heiße Superphantastisch!

Phot's Moll

Willowmound

Lightly salted

Charlie Horse

Speaking in metaphors

tehuti88

Mackinac Island Fanatic

Phaeal

Whatever I did, I didn't do it.

Aschenbach

Moral Marjorie

kuwisdelu

Revolutionize the World

OremLK