Writing Fiction

Fleshing or Padding

A commenter raised an interesting question:
I have written a story that is 17,000 words. I love the story and enjoy it every time I read it. To add more words just to make it longer, feels to me as though it would be filling the pages up with useless words. But, that said, I know publishers would not be interested in my story because of the length. How do I add on without making my story draggy?

Sometimes it's possible to interest a publisher in a story of this length. In literary fiction, collections of short stories and novellas can succeed—especially if the author is also known for novels. A story collection can often fill the gap between two longer works.

In genre fiction, it's tougher. But SF and fantasy, at least, have "theme" anthologies where the story length can be anywhere from 500 words to 20,000. Anthology editors often invite submissions from unknown writers as well as stars.

But let's say you love the story and really want to see it published as a novel. How would you expand the story to four or five times its present length?

In your shoes, I'd open a blank file in Word and unleash my inner editor to write a critique of the story—not a condemnation of it, but an exploration, putting my inner editor's thoughts about the story into sentences and paragraphs.

This procedure, for me, is so successful it gives me the creeps: My conscious mind starts feeling like a stenographer, taking dictation from someone down in the basement of my brain.

So I'd ask my inner editor about the theme of the story, and whether the story could explore the theme more deeply or widely.

I'd also ask about elements in the first few scenes: Were they thrown in just as details to lend verisimilitude, or could they be expanded? That childhood friend of the heroine—she disappeared after page 7. What if she stuck around and got involved in the plot? The small-town culture gets described in two paragraphs; maybe we need to dramatize that culture, use it as a motivator and source of conflict throughout the story.

The climax of the story would be important, but I'd let my inner editor type away about how the story builds to that climax. Could we build more characters and incidents into the story to increase the impact of the climax? Or could we treat the climax itself as just one more step in a much longer plot, with another 50,000 words of "sequel" featuring an even bigger climax near the end?

My inner editor would also ask me why I wanted to do all this, so I'd have to come up with some good answers—just as if I were pitching this story to a paying editor. And maybe I'd finally realize that the story had integrity at 17,000 words and just wouldn't work at any other length, longer or shorter.

If that made it unpublishable, fine. It's still a good story, and it's taught me something; I'll tackle the next project, even if it's a novel, with more skill and confidence.

Publishing Early

A commenter just wrote:
Hello, I'm in the process of writing a novel called The Magical World of Winter Valley and my finishing goal will be about 75 000 words to about 80 000 words. I've found myself a publisher and I was just wondering, do you think they could publish this novel if they were interested in it.

I get a lot of email from teenagers who write novels. I don't discourage any of them, because you never know who's going to win the Nobel Prize for literature and become the subject of a biography referring to all the idiots who thought the kid would go nowhere as a writer.

In a very small number of cases, I've seen teenage writing that was actually close to publishable. In exactly one case, I contacted some agents and editors on behalf of a teenager. They agreed she was a promising writer, but they also said she should keep writing without trying to publish too soon.

It was good advice. When you're 25 or 29, you look back at your teenage self and you wince. You also thank God that just a few friends remember what you were like at 15. If you actually published the stuff you wrote at 15, it would stick around in bookstores and on eBay, and you would buy every copy you could so you could burn it.

If you did sell a novel at 17 or 18, the publisher would market you as a weird teenage prodigy...and by the time you turned 23 or 24, that wouldn't work any more. So don't be in a hurry to find a publisher. The time you take marketing your story would be better spent writing another story.

Yes, once in a great while a teenager publishes a worthwhile novel. I can think of Raymond Radiguet and Françoise Sagan. Radiguet died young, which was lucky, and Sagan died at 69, a forgotten curiosity. In the US, S.E. Hinton published The Outsiders when she was 18, and it made a fortune, but what has Hinton published since then?

Let me put it this way: The point is not to write and publish a novel. The point is to write and publish a whole string of novels, each of them showing greater skill and understanding than the last one. When you haven't finished writing a novel, it looks like a near-fatal experience. When you do complete a novel, you realize it's just a project—it might take three months, six months, two years, but eventually the damn thing will be done and you still have 40 years to spend writing more stuff.

So keep writing—novels, short stories, essays, whatever. Pick your teachers' brains. Read everything you can get your hands on. Do all the stupid things teenagers do, whether it's smoking dope, groping other teens, or getting drunk. Just pay attention to what you and your friends are doing. Write about it, not because it's important but because it's what you're doing and you need to practice your craft.

Before you know it, you'll wake up 26 one morning with an idea for a novel and the writing experience to tackle it as a six-month project. By the time you're 28, it'll sell. Ten years later, you'll have a string of novels and nonfiction books, a serious income, and an even more serious tax problem.

Then you can dig out those novels and stories you wrote when you were a teenager. Donate them to your local university library. For tax purposes, those early writings will be worth far more than you'd ever have made if you'd actually published them, and only a small number of scholars will ever read them.

Starting from Scratch

A reader emailed me this evening:

I have just developed an interest in writing. The only downside is that I have absolutely no idea how to write anything worth making it in a novel, or even to be published. I have plenty of ideas that I could make into probably a long enough story to get 50,000+ words. Is there a way to improve my writing skills? A way to get them appropriate and good enough to make a good enough novel to get it in todays society?

Downloads from Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

The second edition of Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy has a CD with some supplemental materials—links to books and authors mentioned in the text, posts from this blog, plus a number of reviews. (I've even thrown in a scholarly article published way back in 1972.) The CD is readable only on a PC, however, so Mac users (including me) are out of luck.

However, I've uploaded those materials as a long Word file, and you're welcome to download it—even if you haven't bought the book. I hope you find these items useful.
Download wsff_cd_items.doc