What If Your Short Story Wants To Be A Novel?

Once upon a time, I was a short story writer who dreamed of one day writing a novel.

During my MFA program, I wrote many short stories. That was my area of focus and I felt like I had a good handle on the form.

I occasionally dabbled in writing novels, particularly during National Novel Writing Month, but couldn’t get any of my novels off the ground and assumed I was better suited to short pieces that could be contained more easily.

For a long time, I was strictly a short story-ist.

Then, in 2014, my autoimmune disease flared up so badly that I could barely walk, eat, or function. I lived in a constant state of fatigue. I’d work my remote job all day (thank goodness I didn’t have a commute), and then have just enough energy to fall asleep by 7 pm.

In short, I wasn’t writing.

When things started to level off and I felt better, my husband and I went on a trip to Bermuda. It was exactly what my spirit needed to recharge after months of feeling horrible.

We came home from Bermuda and I was ready to channel some of my energy into writing again. I was desperate, actually. So I started scribbling out ideas for short stories set in Bermuda since the island had fully captivated me.

Everything I wrote felt like cardboard: flimsy and bland and not at all what I was trying to say.

I had a feeling I needed to spend some time warming up before I tried writing anything concrete. So I set out to write for 100 days straight and worked through my favorite writing program, The Story Course, while doing so.

Eventually, I did an exercise that triggered a scene that I couldn’t shake from my mind. Each time I went to my notebook after that, I wrote more about it.

This went on for a month when I realized the short story I thought I was writing was actually something much bigger.

The problem was, I’d never had any luck with writing a novel before. All of my NaNoWriMo novels had been terrible and my focus in grad school had been short fiction.

I had no clue how to write a novel, especially when I’d done zero preparation!

But honestly, I didn’t have time to stop and doubt it very much. The scenes were coming to me as if channeled. I was writing for 100 consecutive days and truly didn’t have a chance to second guess what I was doing.

I just… wrote.

It sounds too obvious and wildly unhelpful, but hear me out. I think this is a great approach to writing a novel.

I’d tried writing many books before this one and with those, I’d done research and created outlines. And they still failed.

This time, it was as if the idea had been a passing train that I happened to see and jump onto just in time. If I’d been looking the other way, the train would’ve passed by and found another passenger.

I had no idea where it was going, but I was riding the train to the end of the line even though I hadn’t expected to write such a long story.

The magic formula of writing that novel was:

1. Being committed to writing consistently. This allowed the idea to show up and grab my attention.
2. Writing without judgment or expectation. Instead of asking myself what I was doing, questioning if it was a good idea, or stopping myself for some silly reason (like not knowing enough information about the time period, not being prepared enough with an outline, not knowing the ending, etc), I just wrote.
3. Staying open to write what I felt excited to write. Rather than follow an outline, I let the story dictate what I wrote next. I let myself enjoy the process and just put words on the page. I knew I could fix it later as long as I wrote what most intrigued me in the moment.

So what can you do if you’re writing a short piece that wants to be a novel?

Trust your instinct that it should be a long piece

If you have the sense that there’s more story to tell than you want to put in a short story, believe that instinct. You can always cut it back later.

I personally think it’s better to explore a story to its fullest potential instead of deciding initially that a story won’t work a certain way. You never know what’ll be revealed as you write.

Resist the urge to control the process

The biggest mistake I made when writing this novel was trying to wrangle the process about a month into writing.

Once I realized I was writing something longer than a short story, I thought I needed to create an outline and pack the story into a neat box.

As soon as I started outlining, I felt a physical sensation of resistance. It was a contracting, shrinking feeling of dread. I knew outlining would be a feeble attempt at controlling something that I didn’t need to control.

So I tossed the outline and kept writing what interested me. The story revealed itself the more I wrote, and while I did have to do a lot of organizing later to put it all in order, I fully enjoyed the process.

And, amazingly, the one time I didn’t try to control my writing with an outline turned out to be the one time I completed a novel and didn’t hate it by the end!

Read novels carefully and study what makes them work

You can take classes (I’m a big fan of always learning) about certain aspects of writing, but sometimes the best way to learn is to study the form itself.

Read all the novels you can get your hands on and pay close attention to what the writer is doing and how they achieve it.

What do you like the most about your favorite novels? Why do you love them? What is it about the structure, the story itself, the character development that resonates with you?

I also highly recommend the book The Plot Whisperer by Martha Alderson to everyone writing a novel. Even if you’re not writing a novel, it’s still a great read.

The reason I recommend it is because Alderson shows you exactly how a story works. She goes into great depth about character development and how that development happens through story arc.

Once I read this book and underlined almost every single page, something clicked for me that hadn’t clicked before. Story shape made much more sense.

And, honestly, the next novel I wrote was a much more organized process because I had a clear sense of my story’s shape and progress thanks to The Plot Whisperer.

Just keep writing

This is the best advice I can give you when a short piece starts to feel like it should be a long piece. Just keep writing. As long as you have a thread to pull, keep pulling.

Don’t force it for the sake of making the story a novel, but if you have a spark of excitement about what you’re writing, follow that with as much judgment-free curiosity as possible.

You may not know what you’re really creating until you’ve put it all on the page, so don’t stop writing too soon.

Have you ever started writing something only to realize it was meant to be a longer piece than you expected? What did you do?