Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Writing longer works

General Writing Discussion
#1

I’m noticing a few people speaking up about this, and it’s something that includes myself. I have trouble coming up with longer stories, anything past 20k abouts. So I’m wondering what people would suggest to help make that transition from short story to novella to novel?

Is it just coming up with larger ideas, more characters and more conflicts? Dreaming big in a sense? What have people done to help write longer works and not just get stuck in the short story hole (not that there’s anything wrong with that)

#2

My first work was novel length but my recent works have been very short.

The writing prompt yesterday has helped spurn me towards a longer work I think. My work is going to be longer because I’m going to create a bigger world, with lots of places and things to do, one or two applicable sub-plots, and I’m going to take my time getting the characters to the places they need to go.

I’m guessing a good, general strategy for novel writing would be “have lots of things to do, a big place to do it in, and don’t rush getting things done.” Some people have also told me to perhaps, combine several of my separate works into one book or anthology which has more meat to it. I’m assuming a better way to do this would be to have simply put these works together in the planning phase of the novel to begin with. Maybe take several ideas and try to blend them up into something cohesive that will have more going on in it than it would otherwise.

Either that or write a book which has really good sequel potential and just string together several plots like episodes in a TV show. I’m not sure how well that would work, but I’m betting it can’t be the most horrible way to write a novel.

#3

Subplots. You can even write them after you’ve completed the main plot and bolt 'em on afterwards, because when you’ve finished the main plot you’ll have a better idea of what storylines will mesh with it.

Or, as someone suggested earlier, novellas; write three shorter works about the same character, or different generations of the same family, and call them parts 1, 2 and 3 of your novel. Check out David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas for a novel that’s really a bunch of short stories. There’s some kind of connection, sure, but I always feel it’s slightly beyond my grasp and I could get it if only I were clever enough.

I’m the poster pup for short works, though. I’ve done NaNoWriMo and that’s the most words on the same subject I’ve ever managed.

#4

I’m actually the opposite. I go to write a short story and end up with a novella or more.

This, but subconflicts works as well. Character A has to solve conflict A. However, Conflicts B, C, and D are standing in the way of Character A finishing conflict A.

Story involving no subconflicts:
John notices that he’s out of food, and he wants to make a sandwich. He goes to the store and retrieves salami, cheese, and bread. He gets home and makes his sandwich.

Story involving subconflicts:
John notices that he’s out of food, and he wants to make a sandwich. He gets in his car to head to the store, but after several attempts realizes that it won’t start. The battery is dead. He checks his watch and notices that it’s 3:30pm; the he’s just missed the bus and there won’t be another one for half an hour. A quick check of the wallet confirms only enough money for the bus and his sandwich ingredients, so a taxi is out of the question. He walks to the bus stop, planning to wait there for the next bus.

The bus arrives at 4:10pm. He grumbles something to the driver, who shoots him an apologetic look. He sits in the front, and the bus takes off. The ride takes fifteen minutes.

Once at the store, John grabs a basket and gets salami, cheese, and bread. The checkout line is long, but he has time to kill before the next bus anyway.

Sure enough, once he leaves the store, the bus has just stopped. He gets on and heads home. It’s the same driver as the ride there; he somehow managed to retrieve the ten minutes he’d been late. Good for him, John thinks.

He arrives at his stop and exits the bus. The walk home is arduous, his belly is empty, and he’s tired. Not a great way to end the day. But at least he’ll have earned that sandwich!

John opens his front door and slips inside. Once in the kitchen, he opens his bag and lays out two slices of bread with cheese and salami on them. He opens up the fridge, only to find out he’s out of mustard.

“How the hell am I supposed to eat this sandwich without any mustard?” he asks himself. In the end, he says, “Screw this,” and goes to bed really early.

Now there’s obviously a lot more detail in the second story, so detail and imagery is also a good thing to add to my list, but as you can see, the extra conflicts, believable in their circumstances, added quite a bit of length to the simple story. This is good if you need an excuse for your character to go through different plot lines, both for adding length and for shelling out more details about your character.
Take my story. Without the extra plots mentioned, you never would have known that John’s car battery had died and he had taken the bus. You wouldn’t have known that he never actually ate the sandwich, because he’s whiny and needed that mustard (mustard is gross (this is clearly a fact and not just my opinion)). You never would have known that he’s a decent person. After all, when the bus driver was able to make up for being late the first time, John felt proud of him. But what if he made up too much time and was early to the stop, leaving just as John got out of the store?

There’s a lot of methods you can use to increase the dynamic and length of your storyline. Just depends on what will work with the story. Definitely good to experiment!

#5

I’ve only attempted one novel length work, so you’ll want to take this with a grain of salt, but I like to think of each chapter as a story in and of itself…not necessarily to the point of being wholly self-contained (although that can work, of course), I just find it easier to think of in terms of the constituents rather than the whole.

#6

I’ll chime in for subplots with an over arching main plot.

#7

So far, I’ve only written three novels, and they range from 50,000 - 72,000 words. So they’re all short for novels. However, I think one of the differences for me when I set out to write a longer work instead of a short story is that I intend for my protagonist to go on a journey. In both longer and shorter works, there’s usually some change that occurs in my main character, but – in a longer work – it’s not a change that’s easily arrived at. In my short stories, the change is often as simple as a realization. In longer works, the change is something that the main character would have rejected at the beginning of the story. She wouldn’t yet have been a person who could accept such a shift – she has to go through a journey to get there.

Of course, this is an insight that I’m able to see looking backward at pieces I’ve already written. I’m not sure it would have helped me to write a novel in the first place.

#8

You write a story to be the length that it’ll be. It helps to have a very firm grasp on the characters and the world before you embark, and to try to make it a point to include scenarios that will highlight the interesting or important parts of the characters and world, imo.

#9

Zen.

#10

levitates

I mean, that’s literally all there is to it. You should be able to feel if you’re forcing it to be too long or if you’re constraining it too much.

#11

That’s one part, yes. An idea that can encompass a novel, and then having stuff to do. It’s coming up with that stuff to do in between Beginning and End that’s tough. Short stories have the benefit of being laser-focused - you only have room to write about One Thing and anything not directly relevant to that One Thing is cut. That makes ideas easy to conceptualize and plot out - you write the core of the story. With a novel it requires so many details and steps and so on that I have no idea where to start or how to go about doing it. Worse, it involves adding stuff that isn’t directly related to the main plot, and I hate irrelevant details, much less scenes.

Sure, it makes sense to have 'Goal, Finish, now add complications". But a good chunk of the novel is not “here are the ten key plot points, each having a scene.” They’re a hundred small scenes, where each plot point has multiple scenes leading up and coming down. Take a mystery for instance. A mystery novel involves the main character likely taking about 50 scenes putting the mystery together, each scene with a fraction of a clue. That’s 50 separate scenes you have to fill around the fraction of a clue. One easy example: “These characters are talking in a room before the bad guys kick in the door. What are they talking about? I can’t come up with anything for them to talk about. If they’re not talking about plot relevant information then it doesn’t need to be here. So I have nothing for them to talk about!” There’s too much for me to process.

The other part is the actual writing. It is so much work just to Force myself to write. With a short story, I actually have the likelihood of finishing. At the pace I go with short stories, it would likely take me Years to finish a novel. That and the attention span of wanting to move on to the Next thing.

That’s all well and good, but I write to print, and when the mainstream pubs won’t print things under 90K, you need a long story, period. There’s like a dead zone of word counts between 8K and 90K that, unless you self-publish or go with a Small press, you’re not really going to get printed. Furry at least has somewhere you can go, but Sofawolf won’t print a novel under 60K so your options are still limited.

#12

That’s why you seek out ebook publishers. Because we don’t have to worry about how sad and pathetic a thin book looks on the shelf, we don’t have to be so concerned by word length. I’ve published quite a few novellas of the 20-40k region. People do buy them!

#13

I think the thing about novels is that you need to not be afraid to allow them to get a little bit sloppy. I mean, you have two options: you either write something that takes place over a fairly long period of time (journey stories, historical epics, whatever), or you write a story that has a lot of different events take place in a short time (suspense novels are good at this). Or I guess you could mix it up, but those are your two extremes, and in both cases you will end up having a lot to keep track of.

Now, this:

Worse, it involves adding stuff that isn't directly related to the main plot, and I hate irrelevant details, much less scenes.
isn't true. It involves adding in lots of details, yes, but adding in completely irrelevant details that aren't related to the main plot is still a bad practice. Short stories you cut out all the stuff that isn't [i]completely[/i] necessary to the point you're trying to make; novels you don't. This is what I mean by 'a little bit sloppy'; sure, some of the details you might be inserting could be cut without completely wrecking the reader's ability to understand what's happening, but you leave it in anyway to flesh out the world or the plot or the characters a little more and to keep the pace nice and even.

One of the reasons, I think, that very few people read short stories on a regular basis (and this is a fact, last I checked; novels are far more popular than short story collections or literary magazines) is because novels have this nice, slow pace that lets the reader get to know the characters and the world, build up a relationship with everybody they’re reading about, get expectations about what’s going to happen next, and so on and so forth, whereas in short stories it’s more just about reading it, getting the point, and then taking away the message. Kind of like poetry, in that sense. But this kind of character-building etc. stuff is more how you’re supposed to get a novel to stretch out, rather than adding in inane and pointless scenes or just causing the characters to go on tangents while they’re in the process of achieving their original goals. It’s the difference between writing a scene wherein characters on a quest sit down and talk over a campfire about what they intend to do next, and writing a scene wherein characters on a quest randomly fight a whole bunch of goblins in a field and then just move on when they win. Both could technically be cut without losing something totally integral, but the former would still lose a little something. The latter would lose nothing if it was cut (unless said scene comes into play later on, of course).

#14
It involves adding in lots of details, yes, but adding in completely irrelevant details that aren't related to the main plot is still a bad practice. Short stories you cut out all the stuff that isn't [i]completely[/i] necessary to the point you're trying to make; novels you don't. This is what I mean by 'a little bit sloppy'; sure, some of the details you might be inserting could be cut without completely wrecking the reader's ability to understand what's happening, but you leave it in anyway to flesh out the world or the plot or the characters a little more and to keep the pace nice and even.
I think we disagree on what's even somewhat necessary. Yes, I'm aware that what someone Wants to do is to establish character or world build, but authors regularly do too much of it when it's not only not needed, but not important or interesting or insightful at all. I can pick up any novel and find at least 30 pages of stuff that serves [b]no[/b] concrete purpose. Many times I will find myself looking at a scene and going "What was the point of that? That added nothing." The same for a few subplots I can think of and at least one furry book I would characterize the majority of the actual book accomplishing absolutely nothing.

Typically, the above is when either character actions accomplish nothing (do not move forwards, do not create setbacks, do not gain new information or resources), repeatedly demonstrate previously established character traits or repeat world building that’s been the same (look, a new town that’s exactly like the last one, with people doing the same thing already seen), or adding things that either aren’t interesting at all or don’t matter. I don’t care if the protagonist doesn’t like toast, or failed to get into little league, if these things aren’t relevant nor do they give me any actual insight into this character.

I think it’s erroneous to think you need full scenes and chapters to world build or provide characterization. A lot of these things can be done with a very small word count, slid into scenes beside more relevant things. It’s the difference between looking out the window as the car is moving versus stopping the car to focus on the landscape. Or, if you need full scenes and chapters, then the obvious solution is to actually make these points plot relevant, so you have a reason rather than just wanting to show off the setting’s window dressing.

Let’s take characterization. Characterization is almost all motivation and actions. We should know the character’s motivations based on the events of the plot and the character’s words/actions. We also need to know why the character is motivated to do what they are doing - we likely will get this from their motivation directly (the duke killed his wife, which we see on screen), or plot relevant background information. “Wait what, characterization is all about personality.” Personality is demonstrated through action and dialogue, which you can do on every single page. You can demonstrate it as the character moves through the plot. Finally there’s background, which can be easily summed up in two lines of dialogue and/or tied to other plot relevant points. There, every single bit of characterization, either executed leanly and with few words, or tied directly to everything plot related and therefore absolutely necessary.

Also an evenly paced book is a bad move. If it’s all the same speed, there’s no tension and no points of relaxation. If the book is the same pace - let’s say, all tense excitement all the time - then it’s desensitizing the reader. Too slow and there’s no excitement at all, and it’s a sluggish slog. By changing the pace, you give breathing room and contrast. A varied pace is important, not an even one.

One of the reasons, I think, that very few people read short stories on a regular basis (and this is a fact, last I checked; novels are far more popular than short story collections or literary magazines) is because novels have this nice, slow pace that lets the reader get to know the characters and the world, build up a relationship with everybody they're reading about, get expectations about what's going to happen next, and so on and so forth, whereas in short stories it's more just about reading it, getting the point, and then taking away the message.
Characters aren't important to me; it is rare that I'm actually interested in a character and want to know more, and regularly I'm told too much about every facet of their existence than I [i]want or need to know[/i]. I care about plot. Novels have more things [i]happening[/i] than short stories. And the things that happen in novels - large-scale events, epic climaxes, huge confrontations and big fat spectacle - can't be attained with short stories.

IMO the problem of short stories is that you don’t know what they’re about until after you’ve read a few pages - even with an anthology, all you have to go on is genre and perhaps a theme. Compare this to picking up any novel and seeing the description on the back which tells you who the characters are, what the conflict is and generally what’s at stake. Not only do short stories not have that*, but a blurb might even ruin some stories to begin with because they’re all about the surprise concept in such a small space. It’s a matter of expectation. This is why well established short story series - Conan, Sherlock Holmes - do well. These stories don’t give more characterization, you don’t learn more about the titular characters, but you have a solid expectation of what you’ll get before you start reading even if you don’t know the details.

Also, and this might sound silly, it’s easier to tell a sucky novel over a sucky short story. A short story, you don’t realize it sucks until maybe half way through, and then it’s almost over and you can hold out a little hope - then boom, it’s over. So I just read something that wasn’t good and I’m not happy. A novel? You can generally tell in the first chapter or three, and by then you’ve only read maybe 5% of the book. I feel much more comfortable chucking a novel after that point than I do abandoning a short story in the middle.

*There are some places where they do (the blurb on the back of an anthology, an ebook that’s just that short story) and when they do, it makes me happy.

#15

I would argue that adding scenes that actually do serve no purpose is just bad writing. This, of course, says nothing whatsoever about the value of novels or longer works; it’s just a fact. You shouldn’t add pointless scenes into short stories either (although I will admit that there it’s much more heinous).

I think it's erroneous to think you need full scenes and chapters to world build or provide characterization. A lot of these things can be done with a very small word count, slid into scenes beside more relevant things. It's the difference between looking out the window as the car is moving versus stopping the car to focus on the landscape. Or, if you need full scenes and chapters, then the obvious solution is to actually make these points plot relevant, so you have a [i]reason[/i] rather than just wanting to show off the setting's window dressing.
I think my campfire example was misleading: I don't mean the best practice in novels is to literally stop the progression of the plot so you can have character development. The campfire conversation should progress the story, too, and if it doesn't then it's a waste of time. This is one of the reasons I couldn't make it through George R.R. Martin's epic; the entirety of those books is made up of just things happening, and the overarching plot is so nebulous as to be almost non-existent. Hence I found those books [i]incredibly[/i] boring. It doesn't help that most of the characters are stock and that the writing is often methodical and dull, but this is a whole other conversation so I'll stop here.

The point is, short stories and novels both have the same amount of space to play in, but novels take more time to explore every nook of that space.
I mean, if we’re getting down to brass tacks (tax? whatever), to get an idea across all you really need is to state it outright. Dispense with the whole ‘story’ thing altogether and just write a few sentences explaining an idea. But we do the story thing because it’s more impactful and enjoyable. There’s room to maneuver, and novels just make full use of the available room. Short stories it’s more sticking only to the details of the room that you need to precisely sketch it out. Or something. Am I making any sense? Like, you can draw two dots and a line and people will see it as a face, but sometimes you want to take the time to paint a full portrait, in color. With a background.

Also you don't want books to be evenly paced.
Fair enough. I guess I was speaking more 'on average'.
Characters aren't important to me;
Well, that's a big difference between you and I, then. I can appreciate a story that has characters that are little more than tools for the theme (for some reason, I recently picked up [i]Nausea[/i]), but I tend to find them much more academic and hence harder to get through. I might put more stock into characters because often that's the only thing keeping the material fresh (I have a hard time thinking of a plot that hasn't been done at least twice). The other thing, of course, is the writing itself, but there are few authors who are good enough to pull that off well. Ideally you have a work that has a good plot, good characters, good writing, and a flawless execution of a novel theme, but none of us are that amazing.
#16

IF you’re going to have characters sit around telling each other what they’re going to do (I.e. they’re planning their next move), then this is done deliberately because their plans are going to Fail. Otherwise, you’re telling the reader exactly what’s going to happen, and then it happens. That’s boring. If this scene is them telling what they’re going to do after the Plot is over, then really this is informing the reader of these characters endings.

This is one of the reasons I couldn't make it through George R.R. Martin's epic; the entirety of those books is made up of just things happening, and the overarching plot is so nebulous as to be almost non-existent. Hence I found those books [i]incredibly[/i] boring. It doesn't help that most of the characters are stock and that the writing is often methodical and boring, but this is a whole other conversation so I'll stop here.
Well from what I understand Martin spends pages upon pages just describing things like the food. He'll start a plot thread with a character, then kill that character so that character's plot is now unresolvable, resulting in a lot of dead ends. I hear in the latest book, a chunk of it is devoted to a character by himself on a boat. The whole thing sounds like a constant state of [i]pointless[/i] chaos - things happen, but there's no forward movement towards any resolution, and it happens slowly, dully and in excruciating detail.
The point is, short stories and novels both have the same amount of space to play in, but novels take more time to explore every nook of that space.
Oh no, no I don't agree with that at all. Short stories lack room for plot points. There are too many things that need to [i]happen[/i] in order for a novel's plot to happen. If you stripped a novel down to only the scenes that are plot points, that are absolutely necessary to go from ponit A to Z in terms of the plot, you'd likely have 20-30 scenes. With a short story, that should already be every scene. So you may have 5, 6? More important things happen in a novel than can be covered in a short story. You have to remove plot in order for it to fit into a smaller space.
Well, that's a big difference between you and I, then. I can appreciate a story that has characters that are little more than tools for the theme (for some reason, I recently picked up [i]Nausea[/i]), but I tend to find them much more academic and hence harder to get through. I might put more stock into characters because often that's the only thing keeping the material fresh (I have a hard time thinking of a plot that hasn't been done at least twice).
For me it's the details of how it happens. Take a simple plot: knight saves princess from dragon. We generally know how that's going to work. Now: Knight saves Dragon from Princess. Now you're wondering why does the knight need to save the dragon, how does the princess have the dragon, how is the knight going to save the dragon, and then what? Same plot, but by altering who is in what role, you get different details.

Look at every single action movie or horror movie ever created. Generally we don’t care who the protagonist is, and their personalities are pretty identical. And the plots are almost always the same. But what is different is the details of how it all goes down. The same thing with mysteries - the difference is the circumstances of the crime. That’s pretty much every single episodic TV show ever - the characters are established, they don’t change and aren’t fleshed out any more than they are, it’s just them in a new situation, everything goes back to normal post-situation, so the only thing that matters IS that situation.

It’s like this. If I say to any random person, “There’s this guy named Jack, and he’s trapped in a car. The car’s on fire, but he’s stuck.” Most people are going to say “What happens next?” and not “Who’s this Jack guy, why should I care about him?”

#17
Well from what I understand Martin spends pages upon pages just describing things like the food. He'll start a plot thread with a character, then kill that character so that character's plot is now unresolvable, resulting in a lot of dead ends. I hear in the latest book, a chunk of it is devoted to a character by himself on a boat. The whole thing sounds like a constant state of pointless chaos - things happen, but there's no forward movement towards any resolution, and it happens slowly, dully and in excruciating detail.
Couldn't have said it better myself... Maybe someone should start a Game of Thrones discussion thread. I read the first two books, so I have a lot to say about it, but right here isn't the place.
It's like this. If I say to any random person, "There's this guy named Jack, and he's trapped in a car. The car's on fire, but he's stuck." Most people are going to say "What happens next?" and not "Who's this Jack guy, why should I care about him?"
Oh, so you're talking more about, like, Indiana Jones type stories. I got you. I will admit, those are fun despite the complete lack of characterization. But I will also stand by my position that having interesting characters can add a lot to a story. It all depends on what you're going for, I guess.
#18

But for tv shows, the arcing story is about the characters themselves not the individual mysteries they solve. Not to mention the way they differ those shows up is by creating different characters with awkward traits and seeing how they would analyze and solve the problems put before them. The character development is the long term story.

But as soon as the car is gone and the mini conflict is over, if Jack isn’t interesting, we don’t care anymore and the rest of the story flops. Plot isn’t everything.

I think Firefly and how everything I hear about that show is the characters. I don’t remember much of the situations they got into during the series, but the characters themselves is what has stuck out and is remembered in my head. If the characters weren’t real characters without interesting quirks and development, the rest of the story gets boring very fast.

#19

Not really? I mean, looking at a show like say CSI, the characters change so little even over the entire length of the show. The most change you ever get is like, “oh this character is now willing to go hangliding after working a case on hangliding”. Even when when two characters end up getting MARRIED, there is so little actual on-screen development of their relationship. It differs based on the show, but I flat out do not see see a lot of character change in many episodic shows, even from season to season, or the lifespan of a show.

But, I was looking over a book on plot and it actually said there are two kinds of plots, when discussing things like this. There’s the Entertainment plot - the conflict is all exterior threats, there’s very little focus on character development - characters are pretty much the same at the end as they were at the beginning. James Bond films are an example. They are written merely to entertain. Then there are Serious plots, where the development of a character is the plot - the choices a character makes that changes who they are as a person. Pick any “Literary” book as an example.

And in that sense I am saying that I prefer entertainment plots a lot more. Or rather, I start reading because I want conflict and excitement, and to be lost in an interesting world, to see what’s new or at least different (and what I can crib from it). If I get into to a character, it’s because they’ve grown on me while I was enjoying the first part. I can keep reading if the character is bland but the story/world/etc is interesting; I just cannot if it’s the other way around.

#20

Character development = change of a character over time.

Firefly was about characters with snappy dialogue and interesting quirks/outlooks getting into various situations. But I don’t recall many characters who were different at the end than they were at the beginning.