18.52: Writing Inside The Box
“Your short story should definitely be a novel.” It’s something writers are often told when they write short stories. What tips and tricks can you use to keep your idea within the length of the story you’re trying to tell? We dive into worldbuilding in miniature, pacing, and character development. We also think about where you can edit your writing down—whether it’s words, plot threads, or characters.
Homework:
Write a scene with two different endings – one that puts a button on the story (for short fiction) and one that asks a new question (for a novel). Identify what else would need to change for each to make those endings work.
Thing of the Week:
Scenes From a Multiverse by Jon Rosenberg
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key points: Short stories versus novels? Short stories stick the landing and get out. Novels linger. Short stories that feel like they should be novels often open another story question in the ending. Pacing! Beginnings, also. Short stories are dense with information about what’s coming. Novels are more like a layer cake, lots of threads setting up. How much depth do the characters have, what about their arcs? Think about short stories as movies, while novels are series. Length = ((((characters + locations) x 750) x plot threads) / 1.5) Consider the novella! Try-fail cycles, especially implied ones. Word count!
[Season 18, Episode 52]
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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Seaons 18, Episode 52]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Inside The Box.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[Erin] Okay. What we’re going to talk about today is the difference between sort of the way that short stories work in the way that novels work. What I mean by this is when I teach, I often have people write a short story, and at the end of it, I’m like, “This kind of wants to be a novel.” On the other hand, whenever I want to write a novel, it’s like, “This is actually a short story.”
[Chuckles]
[Erin] So what is the difference between these two, and what are we doing differently, and how do we know which one our story should be?
[Mary Robinette] Okay. So. I have a lot of feelings about this, because… Because I started as a short story writer and I moved to novels and one of the things that would happen to me with my novels was that people would be like… Was that my endings always felt rushed, because I was doing a short story ending. One of the things that happens with a short story is that you stick the landing, and you get out. Okay? With a novel, you kind of linger. But when you’ve got the short story that feels like a novel, what happens is that you’ve opened another story question. So, people who’ve heard me talk about M.I.C.E. Quotient, I will recap it very quickly. It’s an organizational theory. You’ve got milieu, inquiry, character, and event. Each of these represent a kind of plot thread that can be the driver. Then, when you’ve got multiple of them, you use them in a nesting format. So if you open milieu, then you open inquiry, you close inquiry, then you close milieu. So what happens with the stories that are really a novel is that you get to the end and you close the milieu and then you say, “But also, there’s this character thing.” It… You just raise this one other question. This will frequently happen because a lot of people have been trained on reading novels, and the novel pacing at the end often raises that additional question. So you’re like, “And then there’s this… Dun, dun, dun.” It’s usually a consequence of something that people have done leading up to that point. So, like with your story, Ghost, with the…
[Erin] Sour Milk Girls.
[Mary Robinette] Sour Milk Girls, when she… That final scene, when she’s putting Brenda down, that closes everything up very nicely. If, after that, you had put another paragraph or another line that said, “She’d have to figure out how to set this right.” That was going to be like, “This feels like a novel.” It’s really… It’s you just exploring that character moment one beat too long.
[Erin] I love that. I think one of the other things that I often see is a pacing… Like, you’re talking about a pacing issue. I often think of pacing is like driving a car. So if you kind of linger on, like, slowly packing up the car, and, like, you’re putting every object in and looking at it, like, to me, that says it’s a long journey and we’re going to be with you for a while. If, then, you’re like, “And after I packed the car up slowly, I was in California, across the country,” it’s like, “What?” Like, I don’t…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Wha…
[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.
[Erin] I feel like there’s more that you were going to tell me, like, why did we go on that jar of pickles for so long…
[Laughter]
[Erin] If it wasn’t going to be important. [Garbled] so I think that sometimes what happens is people are writing a short story and they add all that slow pacing…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] In. Then none of it pays off. It feels like the novel is where it would pay off.
[DongWon] Yeah. I love this idea of like thinking about the ending of the story and how that gestures toward novel versus toward short story, or even ending of a scene, doing that. When I think about the beginnings of things, it’s also lining up with what Erin is saying, that there are 2 kinds of density that are really important. Right? A short story is dense in information about the main thing that you’re engaging with. Right? It’s setting up the main conflict, it’s setting up the main questions, all of those things. A novel’s going to be dense like a layer cake is dense. Right? Like, there’s a density to a short story where you’re getting a lot of, like, chewiness right away. But a novel’s going to have lots of different threads being laid out in that opening scene, in terms of here’s a wide range of characters, of worldbuilding, of plot hooks. Right? If you’re introducing only one element in your opening scene, that often tells me, or often will feel more like a story versus if you’re finding a way to seed in multiple questions and adding depth to what you’re doing. That, to me, feels more novelistic and makes me feel like this is… There’s enough here to expand and grow. Because in a novel, fundamentally, very rarely are you only going to have an A plot for a novel. You’re generally going to need a B, C, D, E plot in various ways or different elements that come in and out. Right? Even if A and B is your main one. Whereas a short story, you can really do… Just have one or maybe one and two. Right? You look at all three of the stories that you gave us for this really are just one plot. Right? There’s one set of characters, one set of actions. There’s flashback components in Sour Milk Girls, but these are so integrally tied into the forward action in the main plot that they don’t feel like a B plot in that way. So that’s kind of how I tend to think about the difference of when you’re meeting the story. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I’m in complete agreement with that. I think of it in terms of proportion. That both of them use the same kind of tools, many of the same… There’s many of the same recipes that can be used. But for a short story, you’re making it a single serving.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So instead of 3 cups of flour, you might do a cup of flour, if you’re cutting it down by 1/3. Or a tablespoon of flour. I can’t imagine what that recipe is, but… What I think happens to a lot of short story writers who have been trained on novels is that rather than cutting the proportions down across the entire story… So, fewer characters, fewer plot threads, fewer words right at the beginning, they cut it all from the end of the recipe. So it’s like saying, “All right. So, I’m going to make this serving for one person. I know that that means that it only needs to take up… It needs to go into this bowl. Put in a cup of flour… Or, put in 3 cups of flour, and my sugar, and… That’s all it can hold. So I’m going to leave the liquid out.”
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Sounds like how I cook.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I always end up with food for 10 people, and people are like, “There’s only 2 people coming to dinner. What did you do?”
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] That sounds like a delicious breading for something. The way I handled it in Schlock Mercenary, every one of the adventures that the Toughs would take on in Schlock Mercenary could be told as a short story with a bunch of… When you think of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the dwarves were all pretty much faceless. We really didn’t have much character for the dwarves. Okay? If you told each of the Schlock Mercenary adventures in that way with faceless mercenaries, yeah, it would be a short story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and some shooting. That’s not why… That’s not what makes the stories fun for me. What makes them fun is the characters having adventures and having arcs. So, at the beginning of these books, I would pick which characters were going to do which things and have which arcs, and each of their arcs could theoretically be compressed into a short story. But by stacking them together, I ended up with long full books that had all of the various pieces and beginnings, middles, and ends, and were long.
[Mary Robinette] So I have this controversial theory that any story can be a short story and any story can be a novel. But that they will be fundamentally different by changing form. So if you think about Wizard of Oz, and we use my M.I.C.E. Quotient theory, you can tell a story about Dorothy and about Dorothy learning, like… Fundamentally, Wizard of Oz, you go into Oz and all of this, but it’s Dorothy learning that she can be satisfied at home. Right? That’s the… That’s her character arc. So when you watch the film, there’s this moment where she goes to Prof. Marvel and he says, “You can… You don’t have to go looking any farther than your own backyard,” and then she goes home. Then there’s the tornado that happens that takes her to Oz. If you decide that you aren’t going to go to Oz, you cut that milieu, if you cut the question of what do the ruby slippers do, and you strip it… If you cut the event of the tornado, and you strip it down to just the character, you’re still telling that beautiful little character arc. It’s not the Wizard of Oz anymore, but it still this beautiful story. You can look at… There’s a number of books out there that began as a short story, and then their authors unpacked them into a novel. The examples that I’m coming up with are much older stories, like The Ship Who Sang, and there are some problems with that story, but… It began as a short story, and that short story is still embedded in the novel. But they’re fundamentally two different books.
[Erin] I was going to say, thinking about that, like, how would I turned the Wizard of Oz into a short story, because I’m the opposite way. I want everything to be short fiction. We were talking about nontraditional formats last week. I was thinking about lists, which are one we didn’t talk about…
[DongWon] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] A list…
[Mary Robinette] Yah…
[Erin] I would probably be like 6 times I needed the ruby slippers and one time I didn’t.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] I think part of it is that what you do with short stories is a lot of compression.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] One of the reasons for me that it can be difficult to try to write a novel is that it’s like if I was baking a cake and they were like put 3 cups of flour, but I’m used to using a teaspoon…
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] So, as I slowly dig the flour out, I get really bored. I’m like, “Oh, my God. I’m still, like, dealing with this flour?”
[Laughter]
[Erin] “I’m just going to make the thing I was going to make, because, like, I feel like I’ll be here forever.”
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So, part of it is like changing the techniques that you’re using.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin], like, when are you… When are you like skipping through, like, a large detail and putting it into a smaller one, and when are you taking time to linger over the words and slow down your pacing? We will speak about that more, after the break.
[Howard] There is a high bar that very few things clear for me. That bar is, “Man. I wish I’d written this.” Scenes from Multiverse by John Rosenberg. It is a 4 to 6 panel non sequitur web comic found at amultiverse.com that talks about… I don’t know, anything, politics, sociology, just random funniness. John’s art is crisp and fluid and it’s… It’s difficult to describe. You just have to go look. amultiverse.com, Scenes from a Multiverse by John Rosenberg. If any of you ever wondered what kind of a conversation that horrible, horrible skunk Pepe le Pew might have with his agent, this is the sort of place where you can find out.
[Erin] Uhuh.
[DongWon] So, one thing that I kind of want to bring in that’s a little bit sideways, but I think it’s a useful way to think about it, is there’s been… Interesting things happening in the film and TV world over the past several years. Right? We’ve been in this golden age of streaming, and the thing about streaming is that it’s very focused on a series over features. Right? So it actually became very difficult to sell a feature because movie theaters were contracting, there were less opportunities for it, movies were getting more and more expensive. So everyone’s moving to streaming. Now, what is interesting is I had this realization that a movie is basically a short story sized piece of content. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] So, I was thinking about this when you were talking about the Wizard of Oz, which was a novel, and then got adapted into a short story. I think the reason some of the best movie adaptations are ones that either come from a story… Arrival’s a great example, which is an adaptation of Ted Chang’s This Is the Story of Your Life. Is that the name of the story?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Incredible story, incredible movie. Blade Runner takes the tiniest sliver of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and turns that into a movie by excising 90% of that book. So one thing to think about is we’ve seen Shadow And Bone get turned into an entire multi season series. I think that has been very useful for that series because it gives it the room to breathe. Right? Or, we see The Hunger Games become a trilogy. Those kinds of things. Right? So when you’re thinking about what makes a short story versus what makes a novel, one way to think about it, just because we consume so much visual media at this point, is what feels right is a movie versus what feels right as a TV series? What’s going to be a 10 part, 8 part, whatever it is versus what am I going to sit and experience in 90 minutes, 2 hours?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have a metric for this. Because this will happen to a lot of people, where they go into novel land before they even start writing. They’re very… While I have said I think you can do it with either, you do have to constrain it. You do have to decide what you’re going to focus on, if you’re going to go into short. So. Buckle up, I’m about to do math.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, I have this formula. We’re going to put it in the liner notes. So don’t panic. But it’s basically this. L, that’s the length of the story. So the length of the story is equal to characters plus places. So each character or location can add between 500 to a thousand words to your scene or story, depending on the writer. But approximately that. So you’re going to add those 2 together, you’re going to multiply them by 750. Because that’s the average of 500 to 1,000. So, let’s say that you’ve got 2 characters and 3 locations. That’s 5 total. You multiply that, you get 3750. Then you multiply that by the number of your major plot threads. Those M.I.C.E. elements that I was talking about. So, let’s say that you’ve got 3 major M.I.C.E. threads. So that means that now your short story is looking at 11,250. Then you divide it by 1.5, which represents making the story half again as long, because each M.I.C.E. element can make your story half again as long, because you have to keep it alive. Your spending words on it. So that means that that story would be 7500 words. So when you’re sitting down to write a story, and you’re like, this is about 7 brothers on a voyage through 7 continents…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] This is clearly not a short story. It’s not a perfect formula. I want to be clear. This can be a diagnostic. It can give you kind of a loose idea of short story, novella, novel. But what it can also do is help you reverse engineer, like, why is this so long. Sometimes I will find myself going, “Oh, look. I’ve just added two farmhands. Do I need two farmhands? What are the farmhands doing, what loadbearing thing are they doing?” If they aren’t, then I’ll look at how can I pull them out, how can I roll them together to constr… To pull my length down.
[DongWon] That’s a really cool tool for thinking about that layer cake density that I was talking about earlier. Right? It’s like if you have 2 layers of birthday cake, that’s a short story. If you have a mille-feuille, then that means you have so many characters, so many locations, that there’s no way you’re going to fit this into a short story length. But maybe it’s novella length. Right? Maybe you’re 30,000 words, according to that math.
[Erin] One thing that’s been mentioned a couple times here is the novella. I find it to be a fascinating length. When I was in grad school, I actually took a bunch of novellas and went to look to see how big they were and what was inside of them. I’d be curious to see how they work with that formula. The thing that I found is that they tended to have no more than usually 3 characters…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, 2 to 3 characters and about 8 scenes where… One single overarching goal. There weren’t really side plots. There might be more complicated things happening, but it was like, there is one thing that I want to do, and I’m doing it through 8 different sort of try-fail or different places that I’m taking you, different locations, and there’s only like 2 or 3 other people involved. Which I thought was a really interesting way to like… I feel like that really lines up with that formula.
[Mary Robinette] I’m glad you mentioned that. Try-fail. Because that’s the other place that you can control, and something that you can do in short fiction that’s harder to do in long fiction. So, the number of try-fail cycles that your character goes through affects the length of the thing. One of the things you can do in short fiction is have implied try-fail cycles. That you come in, like, on their 3rd attempt. It’s like we’ve already tried these 2 other things. So you come in on that 3rd one. Or you say, “Well, we’re going to do this.” Then you do a scene break, and you come back after they have done some of that. So you can do some of that in ways that would frustrate a novel reader, because they’re reading for immersion, often. They can get frustrated when they see you skip things. They’re like, “Well, I wanted to see that, too.”
[DongWon] I think there’s an instinct to say, “Oh. A novella is this word count. It’s halfway between a short story and a novel.” But I actually find a novella is much closer to a short story than a novel.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] I think the gap between novella and novels is much bigger than the gap between short story and novella. I do think it’s mostly about those try-fail cycles, about how you’re executing it. It’s not that there’s more layers. Maybe there’s like one more layer in a novella than there is in a short story. But you’re drawing out the action, you’re going a little bit deeper into the questions and sort of drawing out the dynamics a little bit more. So, for me, a novella’s a short story that’s just given a little bit more room to breathe, allowed to take up a little bit more space. Then, sometimes, when I see somebody like trying to write a short novel, I’m like, “No, no, no, no. Let’s back this off. Let’s make this a longer thing, and give room for all of those plots and all of those characters to have their own arcs.”
[Howard] Yeah. One of the tricks to remember here is that the word count associated… The word counts that defined the box that we are working within… Novel begins at 50,000 words and runs clear out to half a million, I don’t know…
[Mary Robinette] Chihuahua killers.
[Howard] It’s so…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I had not heard that term before.
[Howard] Really. You hadn’t. Goodness.
[DongWon] I hear door stopper, but…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[DongWon] Sorry. Anyway, continue.
[Howard] Well, I think a Chihuahua was standing next to the door. I’m not going to finish the thought. I’ll leave that as an exercise to the listener. The point here is that a novella is between a novelette and novel length, except novel length begins at 50,000, but how many 50,000 word novels have you really read?
[Mary Robinette] Back in the day…
[Howard] Back in the day, lots.
[DongWon] Lots of literary novels are 50,000, lots of romance mysteries. There are many publishing categories were 50 to 70 is a very normal length. Actually, they think that science fiction fantasy is completely bonkers. I’m very jealous of my fellow agents who work in those fields. I’m out here editing a 200,000 word novel on a regular basis, and they think I’m mad.
[Howard] You see, what I was aiming for actually was more like 90,000.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] When… We just finished NaNoWriMo a month or so ago, and, yeah, 50,000 is the mark. But for a lot of us, we don’t feel like we finished the novel until our box that we’re writing within has 90 to 100,000 words in it. Which is 3 times the length of a novella.
[Erin] Yeah. I’ve been thinking about the layer cake analogy that we were talking about. I think this is helping me think about how to write the novel I will write in the future. One of the things is that, like, everything doesn’t have to be in the same layer.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette chorus] Yes.
[Erin] You know what I mean. Because I feel like part of in a short story, like, you’re… You’ve taken a layer cake and like smooshed it into, like, one… It’s like amused boosh, like.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] So you’re taking it all in one bite. So your one character kind of has to be doing all the thing. But any longer work, you can have like this part of the theme, or this part of the experience happened in one place, and this part happened in another. Actually, what made me think of this was you talking about movies versus series. I’m a big soap opera fan…
[Ha ha]
[Erin] I was thinking about the way that soap operas, the longest running genre ever…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Like, deal with things and how they deal with romance.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] They will usually have a couple falling in love, a couple really in love, a couple breaking up, and a couple just noticing each other. So they’re giving you every aspect of romance happening, but not with the same couple.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah…
[Erin] That way you’re getting the full layers of the love in the afternoon that you want if you watch soaps, but you’re not trying to make it all happen in the same 2 people.
[DongWon] What a cool thing to know. That’s… I love that. Yeah.
[Howard] Compressing all of those layers, you’ve made me think of baklava.
[Now I’m hungry]
[Howard] All of those layers… I know. I know.
[DongWon] Last week, box of chocolates, and the cake and the dessert this week. We are torturing our listeners.
[Mary Robinette] You know what, I’m going to suggest that we do fit this episode into the box…
[Okay]
[Mary Robinette] Because lunch break is next, and I think that we can let our listeners go.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] That’s right, with some homework.
[DongWon] So, our homework this week is that I would like you to write a scene with 2 different endings. For the first attempt, I want you to try and put a button on the story, that makes it more of a short fiction scene, right? Something that closes it up, leaves you an exit, a way to get out really quick. Then, another version of the scene that asks a new question, and then opens it up into a bigger work. Right? So find a way to close it off, and then find a way to open it up with new questions, new things to explore at the end of the scene.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you’ve applied the stuff that we’ve been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess in social media, or drop us a line at [email protected].