Graphic by Peg Ihinger
Last week, I talked about some things to do with novellas (besides self-publishing them). Most of them involved ways of making them longer, essentially turning a novella into a novel. I’m going to do a post on the three things I came up with, starting with the first one that occurs to many people (because it looks like the easiest): the fix-up/collection.
At its most straightforward, a collection is the easiest way work to get a novel-sized thing to sell, if you’re a writer who does a lot of shorter-than-novel-length work. You take a bunch of short works about Your Hero, sort them into chronological order, and you’re done. The works in question don’t even all have to be of similar lengths, as long as the total word-count adds up to around 100,000 to 120,000 words.
Except it’s seldom as simple as that.
Even a plain collection of unconnected stories works best if there is some sort of order, culminating in a satisfying conclusion. There’s frequently a theme (above and beyond “these are all short stories featuring the same character”), and the order of the stories reflects that theme so that the collection feels finished as a collection (as opposed to each individual story having a satisfying conclusion).
One way of getting to a satisfying end to a string of short stories is to build in an ongoing background problem that eventually gets solved, essentially adding a “B plot” (See next week’s post). Sherlock Holmes chased Moriarity through a number of stories before they got to the Reichenbach Falls. And when the Holmes stories were published as collections, the final story in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes was, of course, “The Adventure of the Final Problem” because it represented the end of that conflict.
Another possibility is to write stories specifically for a themed collection, as Agatha Christie did with The Labors of Hercules—a collection of twelve short stories, each of which is a modern case to be solved by her detective, Hercule Poirot, reflecting one of the twelve labors of Hercules in Greek myth.
Planting a theme or background problem requires forethought, though, and many writers begin writing short stories about a central character simply because they like the character, without considering the possibility of future collections. In this case there are two ways of handling things, depending on whether the author is essentially writing a multi-volume biography or a series of case files.
Biographies fall naturally into chronological sections. The protagonist’s natural growth and change plus milestones like graduating, getting a job, marrying, getting promoted, divorcing, changing careers, and so on act as natural markers that allow a collection or a group of longer stories to progress to a satisfying conclusion. This sometimes requires the author to write an extra story or two to “fill in” gaps in the already-written story progression, to make up enough words for, say, a collection of stories about the character’s childhood. Or there may be more than enough stories about the character’s childhood, but it needs the “finale” (the wedding, the celebratory dinner) that finishes the collection and transitions to the next stage in their life.
Alternatively, each story may be a link in a chronological chain. For example: the first story has the character shipwrecked on an uninhabited island; it details the protagonist’s struggle to survive, and ends with them getting picked up by a passing ship. Hooray, the story is over…but they’re not home yet. Absent another story, the reader can assume the ship was an ordinary merchant ship and the protagonist made it home all right…until the writer opens the next story with the “merchant ship” being crewed by pirates, slavers, or the Evil Overlord’s privateers. The protagonist escapes and lands in a friendly town. Hooray, the story is over…but they’re still not home. And so on.
There’s a logical progression from one story to the next, even though each incident appears to conclude on a positive note—the author is solving the character’s immediate problem in each story, while the character’s overall situation is still a problem. As with a collection, the final story will ideally solve the character’s overall situation convincingly. Hooray, the protagonist is home and all is well, until a new problem arises for the next collection to solve.
Case files, on the other hand, are main connected by the fact that they have the same protagonist. They may not even have a clear chronological relationship—they’re often stand-alone adventures that just happen to the same person. They’re a natural choice for collections (especially detective stories, see above). If an author wants to make them into a fix-up novel, they usually require a frame story—something that hooks them together and provides some sort of progression and/or story arc that wouldn’t be present if the stories were simply presented in order.
Frame stories most often involve someone telling the short stories to someone else—a reporter, an investigator, a boss, an academic, somebody. The plot of the frame story revolves around why the listener needs to know all this. (A common reason is that the frame-listener is collecting evidence about the supposed crimes of the protagonist of the short stories; variations include the investigator needing “the true story” behind the events, or wanting proof of the protagonist’s accomplishments before hiring or promoting them.)
Possibly the best-known frame story ever is Scheherazade’s frame story in The One Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights). In the frame, Scheherazade tells the king stories that she leaves unfinished “until tomorrow.” Since the king wants to know what happens next, he keeps putting off her execution while she spins more and more tales. The frame is its own story, but also provides context and background for the nested stories, plus a bit of tension regarding the possible fate of Scheherazade if her tactics and storytelling fail.
this is really interesting!
i feel like personally sticking to one character after the first story is told isn’t interesting to me – but i wonder if you could do a novel like this centered on an event or place instead. so each story would be about a different character and plot but in the background you could see how each one affects the war or sees a different part of the creepy forest or something.
also thinking maybe some kind of chained effect could work – i finished writing about Alice, but her apprentice Bob has a follow-up story, and then Bob’s sidekick Carol gets to grow into her own hero in the third one.
I’ve definitely seen books like that in the last few years.
Something like that is especially appealing if each different view shows the focal point in a different light — the city is an academic ivory tower to one character, a daily struggle to another, a setting for a quiet separate peace for a third. Or for the chained effect, if Alice’s biggest life-choice looks very different from Bob’s PoV than from hers — still consistent, but highlighting how f’rex living through something give you a very different idea of it than only seeing the results does.
The early Vorkosigan books do this well: what Miles knows about his parents’ lives is both entirely consistent with and wildly divergent from what they know themselves.
>also thinking maybe some kind of chained effect could work
A similar setup is very popular with romance authors – take a side character from Book 1 and give them their own story, repeat for as many books as you want, and boom, you have a series. Another version is to write stories starring each member of a group of friends or family of siblings in turn.
It is possible. There are even full-blown novels where the threads do not lead to a clear main plot vs. subplot difference.
I wrote a bunch of short stories early with a common setting, namely where good ol’ Nikola Tesla invents something pretty strange…and when it’s shown to FDR, he sees some promise in it.
As tech develops over the next several decades, the invention proves to provide almost absolute power to its wearer, for a limited time.
What the stories are about, though, isn’t a power fantasy, but about how the wearers end up getting more and more used and exploited by presidents over the years, as we know what power tends to do, and absolute power does absolutely.
Different protagonist in almost every story. Because, you know, soldiers and similar are nameless to the rest of us.
A lot of my early stuff wasn’t worth (self-)publishing later. But these were.
I think if there’s a Big Thing going on, multiple stories which all share the setting and address the Big Thing in some way can make a coherent fix-up, even if they have different main characters.
Showing my age here–that’s how Asimov’s _Foundation_ works, and Alan Nourse’s _Psi High_ (though the thread that one is strung on is very thin indeed), and Dan Simmons’ _Hyperion_.
I remember being baffled by _The Martian Chronicles_ because it totally ignores the coherency “requirement”–every story, more or less, is set on a different Mars! Bothered my teenaged self a lot. (Worth the price of admission just for “Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed”, though.)
That baffled me about =The Martian Chronicles= too! I remember flipping back through once I’d finished it, trying to figure out how the stories all fit together.
Collections that don’t even have common characters or settings sell better than individual stories.
I think, speaking as a reader, a collection requires less decision-making than picking out that many individual stories. Making decisions about unknown authors, in particular, feels kind of stressful. I’d rather get 15 stories for my efforts, or a novel, than one story–and have to do it all again in 20 minutes.