Writing Short to Write Epic
Last week I finished writing a short story. Already, I can see potential for other stories in the same setting, built around the same central character. The same thing happened with the last short story I wrote. I suspect this is because no matter what element (a cool image, an interesting phrase, a “what if” thought, a provocative character) I begin with, in the end, what I write is character-driven. Often I find myself wondering what those characters may do next.
A Few Fixups
Often when I talk with new writers (in which term I include not only newly-published writers, but also writers who are writing, but have yet to sell anything), it seems that their vision has jumped far beyond the “mere” short story. They speak of epics, usually of at least three volumes, although nine are not uncommon. Since many of these people have not yet written a prose narrative of any length (although often they have reams of notes, world-building concepts, and character biographies), I find myself boggled.
Back in the days of yore (roughly the late-1980’s) when I was moving from simply writing for my own amusement to trying to sell what I was writing, the common advice for new writers was as follows: Write short fiction. Send it out. When you start selling, you’ll be in a better position to find an agent or publisher for that novel-length work you have in mind, because you’ll have proven you can write professional prose.
About ten years ago, the markets for short fiction – which had been thinning even when I began trying to publish – began to flat-out vanish or, in cases like Fantasy and Science Fiction, publish less frequently. Even today, as on-line-only publications like Lightspeed and Clarke’s World are beginning to fill in the void, finding a publisher for a short story is much, much harder.
Does this mean that writing a bunch of short stories that might not find a market is a bad idea? Honestly, I don’t think so. Short stories are a good way to hone one’s prose. They teach you about narrative hooks – something that novels need throughout their length, not just at the start. They teach you about economical characterization, which is valuable for making even minor characters jump off the page. They teach you about pacing, about the necessary balance between plot, setting, and characterization.
Moreover, when I have encountered many of those would-be epic writers some years later, they are at precisely the same point, in part because the task they’ve set themselves is so enormous. Hold on to that thought… I’ll come back to it in just a bit.
However, first I want to deal with the protest I can hear forming. Yes. There are writers out there who seem to have jumped directly to writing novels without having written shorter work. Often, if you look behind the scenes, “novel only” writers will have actually done some sort of apprenticeship at shorter lengths.
David Weber is a good example. Even today his “short” stories are rarely under novella length. However, how many of you know that, long before Weber started writing novels, he produced a lot of writing at a shorter length? He wrote huge amounts of non-fiction for the publicity firm he ran (initially in collaboration with his mother). Later he wrote for game design. Both of these taught him how to write vivid prose.
Even though the markets for selling it have decreased, short fiction need not be “wasted” writing. Many of the early SF/F novels were actually expansions or collections of shorter works featuring the same characters and settings. These collections have been saddled with the term “fixups,” as if the collection was an afterthought. In some cases it may have been, in others –as in my own example – the writer may have been thinking from the beginning about how those shorter stories would eventually provide the elements in a more complex tale.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction makes an impassioned argument in favor of the fixup, noting that as a form it may be the best way for an author to produce work of epic scope. Their example is from Heinlein, but another good example is James Blish’s Cities in Flight. Much classic sword and sorcery, including Howard’s tales of Conan the Barbarian and Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, were fixups.
Ironically, as print fiction seems to have forgotten this model, television and movies both have adopted it as a means of building a complex story arc and providing the viewers with both the satisfaction of a complete episode and the sense that a larger tale is unfolding.
Another alternative is writing a novelette or novella that could later be expanded into a novel. Roger Zelazny did this with several works, including his award-winning novel This Immortal (based on the story “And Call Me Conrad”), as well as with the novel The Dreammaster (based on the story “He Who Shapes). I’m sure many of you could offer examples from other authors’ works.
So, here’s a thought for all you would-be writers of epics. Maybe the best way to your goal would be to try being writers of short fiction. You’ll achieve your epic scope in small stages, with the added bonus of producing readable tales long before the doorstop book would ever be completed.
