So last time we met, I mentioned the two basic ways of turning a single short story into a novel: adding complications, subplots, characters and conflicts within the confines of the original story, or continuing on from the end of the short story (and letting the extra
Read more →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.
Read more →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
Read more →It’s been a long time since I wrote a short story. I think my grand lifetime total of short stories is about twenty, of which perhaps twelve were publishable. This is because I’m a natural novelist, which is also why I don’t tend to talk about writing
Read more →How do you decide where a story starts? Stories, short or long, generally are not about characters who are happily living their normal lives. Something unusual is going on; something has upset the status quo (whether the status quo was a miserable life as a slave, or
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