In this week’s episode, JP and Crys talk all about writing to different story lengths and the different things you need for that. Whether its short stories, novels or series, they discuss how to reach your writing goals.
Question of the week: If you write one type of story, whether it’s series or whether it’s standalones, what is the thing that scares you about writing the other or that confuses you about writing the other? Share your answer here!
Don’t miss our weekly check in on Patreon (it’s public!) where we talk about what we’re currently learning, any thoughts we missed in last week’s episode, and our plans for this week!
Show Notes
Transcript
JP: Hello friends. This is episode number 72 of the Write Away Podcast and it is December 2nd, 2021, as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my wonderful co-host…
Crys: Crys Cain.
JP: Hello, Crys. How are you?
Crys: Exhausted. I don’t know why, but I definitely rolled out of bed 10 minutes ago.
JP: Fantastic.
Crys: Oh, how has your writing week been though?
JP: My writing week has been good ever since I realized that there’s a tool that is so simple that I just have to use, and then it works very well, and it makes me very angry. But to-do lists, they’re a thing. I know I’ve said it before, and when I stop using them, I don’t get as many things done. And then when I have three projects and I put a to-do list up, I work on all three of them.
Crys: Yeah. Yeah. I have been using more to do lists as well. The last couple of days I have not used it and they’ve been a bit more scattered, but they’ve also been really focused on like, okay, I’m working on one task and one task only today. And so I just haven’t done a to-do list at all. Today might be a little bit different.
But yesterday was my deadline for my taro t story. Did I get it done? Absolutely not. Did I actually finally start working on it yesterday because I have a deadline and feel really pressed to finish it today because it’s now overdue? Yes.
So yesterday, because I was like, okay, I have to do this, I have to get the story done, I pulled up my notes, I pulled up what I’d written before and I’m like, okay, yeah, like this technically fits the Tarot that I pulled. Technically, it fits the story. But as we have been strengthening our craft over this last year, we’ve done a lot of digging into character motivations and choice. And I was like, it’s just, it’s not strong enough for me to sit down and write and know that I’m going in a direction I like.
So I pulled my notes out and I’m like, all right, we’re just going to start from scratch. And I’m going to figure out how to do this story. And I had some success yesterday and that prompted, that and another conversation I’ve had with another writer friend, prompted today’s topic, which is: writing to different lengths and the different things you need for that.
So this is a short story. It, however, does take place in my larger world that I’m writing for the fantasy. And so I spent inordinately long amounts of time yesterday focusing on magic world building for this tiny story that will probably be between 4,000 and 7,000 words.
But for you, yesterday when I said, have we talked about how you write to different story lengths, you said you had ideas, what ideas or thoughts popped up for you? Because you actually came at it from a different way, which was, how do I figure out how long a story needs to be or is meant to be? And I came at it from more like, here’s my canvas, it’s this big, how do I fill it?
JP: Yeah, I think sometimes I approach it in that aspect because like, I’ve got a short story I’ve got to write, so I have to find out what story fits into that bucket. But other times when I’m talking with my co-writer and we have ideas for our storyworld that exceed outside of the six books that we’re working on, we’ll give it a little bit of air, and from the conversation we have, we can decide where that would best fit. Like from one of the conversations we were able to determine like, yeah, that would be really good as a trilogy, because it seemed to have a varying amount of arcs that would fit in most trilogies that I’ve read.
When it comes to like short stories, it’s really hard. This is the fun part, this is why I really like short stories, is because it’s really hard for me to compress an idea into a short story. And I really enjoy doing that because it seems so frustratingly difficult to be like, what can I cut away?
So we are going to make another short story within our storyworld. And when we were talking about it, it kept having that probability, that chance that it could explode into a novel. And we had to just keep pushing and pushing until we were like, okay, what things can we hit? And this is why I love the three-story method, is what simple things can we hit from conflict choice, consequences, and then like some obstacles to just compress that idea into the smallest thing it can possibly be.
And one other thing I really liked that both my other co-writer Jeff Elkins does, and then some of the authors that I’ve read in the past, like some of my favorite authors, is they will start a storyworld or an idea with a short story, and then they will grow it into a novel.
So like I know that the one that we are working on could become a novel. And I think that the advantage is switching the viewpoint and then it’s the same story, but in a different perspective. And then it makes it a whole different and longer piece of work.
Crys: Yeah. One of the things that I’m discovering about writing short stories in a world that I know expands beyond the short story, is that I feel less compulsion to give into my desires to make it a super long story. And by that, I mean to write as super long story. I know a lot of the implications that happen after my short story finishes. They may never appear in the actual, like bigger story, but they may expand this short story into a series of short stories or into its own novel at some point. But it has definitely allowed me to be like, okay, like we are creating the short story, we know what happens, we have notes, it’s gone into the storyworld bucket. And it’s not lost, it’s not ignored, it’s sitting there just in case.
JP: That’s what I did with my tarot story too. And I think that this leads back to the You’re Going To Need A Bigger Story is I don’t like writing things with the idea that that is only going to be the only piece of work regarding that world. I always want to leave that opening that something more could come out of it. And so I wrote that short story, it has a clear ending, but there is this minute cliffhanger and it’s something I would love to explore in that storyworld. And so that’s what I like to do, especially with short stories, is we have this moment in my short story that is very contained. And then we have that, here’s the potential for more.
Crys: Yeah, there are some authors who prefer using short stories as pure experimentation, where it is disconnected from anything else they’re writing, because they don’t want to be trapped into their current world building or whatever it is. That’s absolutely valid and a hundred percent.
I think I do that sometimes. But not as much as I used to when I was younger before I had like storyworlds that I was committed to. Now I want everything moving forward on the same train. The conversation that I had with another author that kind of prompted this was, we were in a conference and in a small group online and talking about our three Cs from three-story method, conflict, choice, and consequence, and Pixar pitches and all this. And I was going over the larger story, and I made the comment that I had this realization that originally I was going to have my main character on this journey until she got to the main city, she was going to be by herself for at least 20,000 words.
And I was like, this is really frustrating because the side characters are such a huge part of my joy and she doesn’t meet them until like we’re 20,000 in, and I really want to bring them forward. I was like, oh I can. I can have them on a journey somehow, and they meet up and that’s how they connect. And then had this realization. But I told her, I was like, I don’t know what her turn is at the end. I don’t know what her big choice is until I know what the external circumstances are and their force.. And so what brought these other characters on this journey with her?
And she’s a single title author, like she doesn’t write series. And she was like, why do you need to know what their motivations and all that are? It’s about your character and you just manipulate things to support their journey. And I was like, ah, and this was just a light bulb I had because I never even considered that. I was like, ah, it’s because it’s a series. And not only that, it’s a serial, and not only that, but it is epic. And so we’ve got multiple viewpoints, multiple characters who take the screen now and then, and so their motivations do matter for the longer story. Maybe not for this immediate moment, but it matters over the course of 500,000 words.
JP: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s something that I almost always start with is like the multiple character motivations, which is probably why everything I want to write ends up being longer than a single piece. But I think that, and then also, like in the story you want to tell, like how many places are you going to, like these things will help determine how long it’s going to be. So like the tarot short story, my character, one of them is going to this castle, they’re basically having a confrontation, and then at the very end, they’re leaving it. That’s really it. So when it comes down to like, well, how many scenes is that? That’s probably seven tops. I think that’s how many I have in there.
So obviously then that becomes some type of short story. Now, sure I could have expanded that, I could have had him going out and exploring the world a little more, and then it would have been a novel. And the things that lead up at the end, that could have turned it into a series. But really, it was trying to determine what I wanted to tell and knowing that was just going to fit within these couple of scenes.
Crys: Yeah, Mary Robinette Kowal has this great method of estimating how long a work will be for short stories. This doesn’t really go beyond that. And it is the character plus the place, so how many new locations? So for yours, it would be like the carriage, the kind of meeting room that they sit in, I don’t know what the actual word is for that, and the bedroom, and then maybe one other place. Was there like a gardening, like running outside the castle one?
JP: No, there were moments that there were traveling to. Then there was inside the castle, there was like three rooms they would go to. And then this like woods they end up in.
Crys: Okay. Yeah, we’ll count that as like four. And then there’s basically four main characters if we don’t include the castle. Your couple that comes to the castle, the father slash king, and the uh…
JP: Grimston.
Crys: Grimston.
So four there. So we’d have eight there and she says, multiply that by 750. Because you’ve written yours, I’m just curious if this plays out. And then multiply that by your total number of major plot threads, which is the mice quotient.
Do you have your character leaving the place at the end or no?
JP: So the main character is stuck in that world and almost everyone else leaves him.
Crys: Okay. So I’m thinking we have, I think a character thread, which is he’s dissatisfied with where he is in life, so he’s going to get something from his father. We have maybe inquiry thread, not inquiry, event, which I feel like there’s something that happens before.
I’m trying to decide if I should give spoilers, but you know what I mean, before the big.
And then she says divided it by that, so we’re at 12,000 divided by 1.5. And we ended up with about 8,000 words is what she estimates that particular structure would bring.
JP: It’s 8,000 words.
Crys: So that’s fun. We did it. Okay, so the different lengths. We have short story, there’s novelette, we’re not really going to deal with that specific novella. I’m going to group them novella and novel together for terms of this discussion because they’re more similar than not. Then we have series, and then we have epic or slash storyworld.
So for a short story, we just talked about those elements that we try to limit and contain. We try to let them contain characters, scenes or locations, and plot threads. Most short stories don’t need more than two plot threads. Beyond that, and you start getting into your longer stories. And the main difference between a novella and a novel, again, would just be limiting plot threads and characters. Where then when you get to a novel, if you’re doing a solo novel, you can have more than one main or one viewpoint character. And you’re going to have plot threads for each of them.
So you’re expanding there. If you only have one main character, then everything is supporting that main character’s journeys. The others might have journeys that are reflective of their journey, either as antithesis or as slight clone, but everything goes towards that main character’s journey. When the book ends, the story ends.
Whereas with a series, then you get so many plot threads. Even if, and I’m thinking of the Dresden Files, even if you only have one main character and you are following them throughout every single book, the implications of what happened in each book spawn off motivations for side characters, for antagonists, that then come back in later books.
So there’s a lot more understanding that you need or build through all of those characters.
JP: Yeah, definitely. And there’s a lot more room for other character motivations and other characters stories. Characters that would even be tertiary characters, you know them a little bit deeper.
Crys: I would say that you’re actually moving more into the storyworld versus series. Because once you move into storyworld than those tertiary characters and all of those, then I think that’s when those really start to spawn.
JP: True. But I guess the one that I’m thinking of, because I grew up with it, would be Harry Potter, and like Neville Longbottom is more or less like a tertiary character, but we end up knowing so much about him and so much about his past and just like his motivations. And I’m thinking of, he may have become like a tertiary that becomes a secondary, I think that makes more sense. But you see this growth, this change of character positioning. I think that’s what you see more in series.
Crys: Yeah. And the interesting thing about him that reflects more of the novel view of that kind of side character, is that he is always a reflection of what Harry could have been if Voldemort had switched the choices. So it’s still, like for him, because he is more tertiary it’s still is almost always about like, how does it affect Harry’s journey? But because there was enough depth over the course of a series could have easily have spinoff stories about him later on. He became a fan favorite.
Yeah, one of the, I think glories for those of us who like writing in these character rich worlds, the benefit of writing in a storyworld is that we don’t have to limit our stories, that we can follow off all the tangents we want at some point. For me, that does help me limit the story I’m telling, because I don’t have this, oh, but I’m gonna miss writing out this cool little thing here. I’m like, no, you can save that and it can show up somewhere else.
JP: Yeah. That’s really funny because I think I do that exactly to the T. In the story that Abe and I are working on, a lot of beta readers have stated their liking towards the main characters mother. And they like want to know more and more. And so it was actually a conversation we had before even handing it over to betas, where we were like, we like this character and we want to know more about their past, but I don’t know if that’s a good place to put it in this story because it’s going to take away.
So that was the trilogy part where we were like, okay, we’ll plot this out in like an hour and then we’re going to put it aside and we’re going to say, okay, we will address that later. But then that way our story doesn’t have to focus on that piece because we know we can come back to it later.
Crys: Your story is informed by the depth of that plotting that you did.
JP: Yeah. A hundred percent, because now we know what happens with that character, how they interact with other characters that come into the series, because we had that conversation and then we were able to shove it to the side and say we’ll address this later.
Crys: Yeah. And I think that writing in a storyworld, and this is turning into a storyworld fancast right here, writing in a storyworld and allowing yourself to do that, again, frees you from the guilt of wasting time and that’s in air quotes, figuring out backstory, because you’re not wasting time. You are planning another piece of intellectual property.
JP: Definitely and too, like the reason I like it the most is because one, it always feeds into itself. So more than likely someone will read one and then they’ll get interested in reading the others. But you can always experiment and you can always look at a different person’s point of view. You could go with a character that is completely off the wall, doesn’t really exist in a series, but exists in the world. You could change up genre. That whole conversation about experimentation for short stories, like to me, if you did that, you could still experiment in your storyworld and test waters with different genre, with different writing style, because it’s just another piece of intellectual property that may or may not feed into the rest of them.
Crys: Yeah, 100%. One of the things, so when we did our tarot pulls, one of the characters that came to mind for one of the tarot cards was my main character. And I had her be a mage because my main character in the serial, as a grand whole, she is an elementalist. She has an affinity with elements and she doesn’t understand that no one really teaches that where she lives. So she goes to this place that is very full of magic to see if she can learn. She doesn’t fit in there because they have a very different kind of magic.
So one of the things I was able to use this story for, because I was like, I’ll have my main character be a student mage basically. Which allows me to build on that world building and figure out a little bit more of how their system works, how their training works, and explore that while creating another piece of intellectual property. So that I know so that when she gets there, so that when she gets to this place, I know what challenges she’s facing. I know what the system is, I know what kind of structure she’s trying to fit her square peg into a round hole or a round peg into a square hole. However that works.
JP: Yeah, definitely.
And like we’ve been talking about, all that does is offer not only a piece of intellectual property, but it gives you the ability to explore something deeper than just an outline because you’re exploring characters through writing, through drafting.
Crys: And I find that what’s really helpful for me, is, the spinoff stories, they come very naturally. As you’re telling your main story, the spin-off stories come very naturally. When I have a problem that I need to figure out as far as world-building, as far as like how the system works outside of my main storyline, is figuring out what characters might exist that my characters are not necessarily planned to encounter and write something about them, because it forces me to look at the world from completely different viewpoints, completely different understandings, completely different biases and prejudices and knowledge and work at it from that viewpoint and build more of a 3d picture.
Yeah, there we go. That’s how we approach. Make everything one big story. Even your short story.
JP: Sorry, not sorry.
Crys: So my question for our readers this week is actually based on that conversation I had with our writer friend. And that is: if you write one type of story, whether it’s series or whether it’s standalones, what is the thing that scares you about writing the other or that confuses you about writing the other?
JP: Yeah. I want to know.
Crys: For short stories. Whatever your expertise is, what confuses you about writing the other?
JP: Yeah, because now I’m like, oh no, am I blind to something?
Cause it could be unaware of something.
Crys: Thank you so much for joining us this week. We will be choosing our next book club book choice in the next week. So if you are a member of our Patreon, please do jump over to check that poll. And if you would like to help us choose, you can also check out our Patreon and join for as little as $1. See you all next week.
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