Exploring a Longer Story

I’ve had a great time in the last eighteen months writing short stories. It’s been a fantastic way to focus my learning and progress in the craft. But there are some things short stories can’t teach me, so in the first few months of 2013, like others in my writing group, I’m planning to write a novella. That is, something less ambitious in length than a novel, but long enough to handle more complexity than one of my short stories.

My novella will be fantasy, so I need to build a world. That’s something I’ve not tackled much in my short stories, which have been mostly contemporary in their settings.

Having once been an architect, I can’t help thinking of writing in terms of design. When I first trained at university we began with smaller scale buildings — I think one of my first was an ampitheatre — and by the end of the degree, we’d moved up to multi-storey, multi-building precincts, in all their interrelated glory. Only one of those buildings would have been developed in greater detail.

The degree took about six years. It wouldn’t surprise me if it takes at least that long for me to make a similar transition to what I can handle in my writing. Probably longer, especially considering that like most people, I can’t write full time.

A novella feels to me like I’m moving from designing a single house (sometimes even single rooms) to a small apartment block.

Of course, a design using words is utterly different from a physical building, but my training inevitably affects the way I approach this, given my lack of experience with longer stories.

So this week, I’ve been nutting out an overall sketch plan. The details are pretty vague at this stage. I have a heroine, and a possible hero – or maybe he’s a villain. I’ve the beginnings of a town where they live, and a rough idea of the technology level. There’s an Order, which works like a religious institution, and there are wildernesses, wastelands, a vague economy, ancient religions, traders, and high and low magics.

I am getting a loose handle on my heroine’s needs and desires, and some of her flaws. Likewise, those of my hero/villain. Other characters are vaguely forming.

I began with a story idea, but it’s already beginning to change. That’s okay. That’s pretty similar to my architectural designing, when I used to do an awful lot of sketching, then crumple the papers up and toss them behind me until they littered my entire floor. (Eventually I would clean up, but when I’m generating ideas, stopping to do that risks breaking the flow.)

I don’t intend to do an incredibly detailed outline, but I feel I need something so that I’m not writing completely blind. I want enough to have a sense of where I’m going, even if that changes.

Novellas have a hard time selling, and it is likely too much to hope I could write a first novella worthy of a sale, though I’ll do the best I can. But I am hoping to learn from the process, and to find out whether I enjoy writing the longer form as much as I do the shorter one.

If you write, I’d love to hear how your approach to your stories varies with their length.