Short to long: Fix-up novels

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

The “fix-up” novel has a long and honorable history in genre fiction. The term refers to the practice of turning short stories into a novel, and the “fixing” is what has to be added, subtracted, or altered in order to make the stories work as a novel.

Most of the time, the continuum of “fix-up” novels covers the various ways of stringing short fiction together into something that has the length and “feel” of a novel. At one end, you have collections of short stories that share a setting, a chronology, and/or some characters but that all still work as independent stand-alone stories. At the other end, you have stories that are woven together so seamlessly that many readers don’t realize that they started off as separate, independent short stories.

Modern storytelling has sometimes added the “mosaic novel” at one end and novels that are an expanded (and often much-changed as a result) version of a single short story. I’m not sure either of those should count as a fix-up.

What kind of fix-up novel a writer chooses to do depends to some extent on what material they have to work with. Technically speaking, when a writer sets out to write a short story, but ends up writing fifty or sixty thousand words more than they set out to write, that writer has not written any sort of fix-up novel. They merely mistook the sort of story they were writing in the first place.

All fix-up novels need some kind of glue to hold the stories together. How tightly or loosely the stories are held depends on the sort of fix-up, and on whether the glue is a plot arc, a theme, a timeline, a background/setting, etc. Fix-ups also usually need some kind of overall arc (which can be character-related, thematic, etc.) The important thing is the sense of movement toward or away from a destination or conclusion, not whether the conclusion is clear from the outset.

Possibly the simplest (which does not mean the easiest) way of creating a fix-up novel is to collect a bunch of short stories that share a setting and background, then create a “frame” story in which each of these tales is being told to a bartender, a police detective, a panel of investigators, a historian, or some guy on a bus. The frame story becomes the glue by providing a justification for the stories to be told, and often provides the fix-up’s overall plot/character arc as well. It’s simple because the stories themselves will probably need little or no rewriting; all that the writer has to do is write the frame story that makes them look like a novel with a modular structure.

A similar but not-quite-the-same method is to pile up a set of short stories or novellas that have the same main character (and therefore occur on the same timeline, in the same setting), sort them into chronological order, and then write set-ups and transitions that reveal or create an underlying plot-arc, plus a final segment that resolves said plot-arc. This can work especially well when the setup for the short stories is something like Star Trek’s mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations…” (A. E. Van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle comes to mind…) In this type of fix-up, the setup provides a good reason for the episodic nature of the events in the short stories, while the gaps between the stories can be filled with slowly developing character relationships, hints about upcoming events, and an overall story problem like “finding a habitable island/planet/place to settle” that can bring the fix-up novel to a satisfactory close.

A lot depends on the short story material the author has in hand. A stack of short stories which all have the same detective as the viewpoint character comes with an obvious setting and chronology, and there are a lot of possible new plotlines that could act as the spine of the fix-up (such as an ongoing search for the missing heir, the grandmother’s murderer, the true evil mastermind, or the stolen diamonds). On the other hand, a stack of short stories that share no main characters because they take place over the three thousand year history of an imaginary country is probably going to do better with a frame structure.

That leaves two versions of short-story-into-novel that I don’t think count as fix-ups, though some people disagree with me, which is why I’m mentioning them in this post.

The first is the mosaic novel, which I think of as a multiple-viewpoint structure on steroids. Lots of different viewpoint characters and different styles, all in the same setting, with the characters overlapping sometimes. This apparently includes shared-world anthologies and probably some multiple-author braided novels. I wouldn’t call it a fix-up because none of these things start from a preexisting stack of short stories. Even in shared-world “novels” that are collections of short stories, the stories are purpose-written for that shared world. Points of Departure, which is a collection of the overlapping Liavek stories that Pamela and I wrote, could perhaps fit in this category, though personally, I still think it’s a collection, rather than a novel.

The second version is at the other end of the fix-up scale, and involves taking a short story and turning it into a novel, either by expanding the short story by adding characters, subplots, and other complications while remaining substantially the same story, or by starting from the short story and simply continuing it, letting it evolve subplots and complications that arise after the end of the original short story.

In this case, I don’t call it a fix-up because there’s only one short story involved. I’m going to talk more about this single-shortstory-to-novel process next week, mostly how it worked for me and what I learned from doing it twice, two different ways.