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When short stories run rogue...
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I'm in the process of doing the same thing in my Asteroid Police series. I'm about 7000 words in, which is taking it into novelette territory. Trouble is, it keeps getting new story lines.
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Well, I just published these four "short stories" as a collection and...one of the short-stories-turned-novelettes turned into a novella!It finished at just over 18,000 words, so at the bottom end of the novella word count. So the final compilation is a novella, a novelette and then the two short stories. Total word count is slightly longer than NightBird Calling.
Christina wrote: "...We can plan, research, and outline..."Outline? What's that?
];P
I did that on the first novel I ever finished and found it only helpful in getting me disciplined enought to finish that story. But by the end I realized I was changing the outline to fit what I had written far more often than I was writing to the outline!
Since then I get the general concept straight in my mind with a known beginning and end point, and then wing it from there. On longer works I usually end up having to write a "What's Really Going On" document, which spells out the final parts of the book, but it's written just as a summary rather than an outline. That way I'm sure to tie up loose ends and make sure I think through the logic of the resolution and don't end up having to fix a lot of incongruities in editing.
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Outline? What's that?
];P
I did that on the first novel I ever finished and found it only helpful in getting me disciplined enought to..."
I hear you on that. I used to write a detailed summary and then as the story meandered, I would write a new synopsis for each chapter. My last two books abandoned that for simply bashing out the story and fixing the gaping plotholes on the first draft. At least with the series I've just started, I've constrained myself to a fixed number of chapters and a 50-70k word count, so that's sort of like an outline.
I still don't get to have control over where the story goes.
Richard 2060 wrote: "I'm in the process of doing the same thing in my Asteroid Police series. I'm about 7000 words in, which is taking it into novelette territory. Trouble is, it keeps getting new story lines."I feel your pain (or discomfort, or whatever).
Mine tended to grow not because I put in new story lines, but because I kept adding story depth. Like in the novella The Cut-Up Man, it was supposed to be a straightforward story about an assassin whose mission was something more than he was led to believe. He gets to the spacestation his mission's on, does some investigation, things become clear, and--boom!--story reveal, end of short story. But I kept asking myself...who is this guy? Why did he become this kind of an assassin? Who would do that to themselves? (Avoiding spoilers.) And same for the antagonists (or is everyone an antagonist when the story's about an anti-hero?).
Ended up adding several flashbacks, foreshadowings, things like that. Before I knew it, there's my new novella.
And the novelette (Please Don't) Put Your Wires In My Brain, which turned out really dark (it's the creation of a character who will show up in later stories as a primary antagonist), grew longer out of a process of discovering backstory I never knew was in there until I wrote the thing. It's kind of like what Michelangelo said about sculptures:
"Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it."
Same thing with stories. They already exist on the page/screen...you have to just write until you discover them.
As far as outlines, so far I've done without. I put plot ideas on index cards and leave them lying around the coffee table. On the last book I did an outline in retrospect to see if each chapter deserved to be in the book (they all did, I decided). I try not to start a book until I know the basic idea of the plot, and not to start a chapter until it's action is clear in my mind. Then I waltz off into Photoshop and start drawing illustrations. I'm glad I'm not trying to make a living doing this!
Arg! Grocer's apostrophe. I shall be struck down. "its"
My current project, a finished novel now being edited, generated a lot of story lines, but by the end it all came back to the original story line, and finished much the way I intended.
Richard 2060 wrote: "Arg! Grocer's apostrophe. I shall be struck down. "its""That's what the "edit" button is for!
Ken wrote: "My current project, a finished novel now being edited, generated a lot of story lines, but by the end it all came back to the original story line, and finished much the way I intended."It's amazing how unforeseen story lines can resolve themselves on their own, even if you don't have a clear resolution beforehand.
And that's really the reason I always begin writing with a generally known ending. I may not know which characters are going to do certain tasks in the end, but by the time I get there that has become clear.
Often I know what I think of as the hilltops of my story: set piece action scenes where plot moving conflicts happen. But the valleys are terra incognito for the most part, which makes them both terrifying and exciting areas to write. You never know what you'll find there, or whether what's lurking in the fog of those valleys is going to throw everything into disarray!
It's much more fun to apologise for the errors, Micah.
As long as it's only on a forum, I'll forgive you, Richard. Just don't go all crazy and start using 'funnily' alot [sic].
Oh, to know I'm not the only one. What started out as a quick dashed off answer to a simple question has sent me into the realms of publishing. Along with the associated headaches. Not to mention, the simple 10 page (don't know word count on that one) answer of back story that morphed into a book, which in turn morphed into a full series. Thank you for showing me I'm not alone out in this frightening world of "Oh, my!" writing.
Sci-Fi, fantasy and speculative Indie Authors...
Books mentioned in this topic
The Cut-Up Man: And other Posthuman Cycle stories (other topics)NightBird Calling (other topics)
Watching the Watcher: A Posthuman Cycle Short Story (other topics)
Born Into Shadows (other topics)
These are in the same universe as my Oct, 2013 release NightBird Calling. Two of these stories have direct tie-ins to NightBird, but neither is a "must read before" story.
I've been using short fiction in this series as a way to do world creation. They allow me to focus on small aspects of that universe's history and cultures without bogging down a longer book in data dumps.
Anyway, two of my wayward short stories have turned into novelettes. Naughty short stories!
Currently this universe is comprised of:
"(Please Don't) Put Your Wires In My Brain" is one of the novelettes, which I'm editing...very dark and rather violent in parts...perhaps a bit problematic to some.
"The Cut-Up Man" is the other (currently) novelette...I don't think it'll reach full novella length! This will be the title story for the collection as well.