From Short Story Collections to Novels
From Short Story Collections to Novels
By Julie Tollefson
Erin Flanagan’s fiction writing credits, to date, span two short story collections and three novels, including Deer Season, which won the 2022 Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author. Here, she offers five tips for planning short story collections, drawing on skills honed writing short stories when you tackle a novel, and understanding why the difference between the two runs deeper than word count.
1) Understand the differences — “I think of short stories as one-night stands, and novels are like a marriage,” Erin says. “They have very different pros and cons. The depth of a novel, that sense of a long relationship, is rewarding, but day to day can be a slog.”
Short stories give readers a snapshot of a character at a very specific moment in their life. Novels, though, require more in terms of both character development and plot. It’s not enough for a character to behave in a certain way. Readers want to know why she acts the way she does and says the things she says.
“In a novel, you have to really understand what brought them there. It took me forever to figure that out,” Erin says. “I was just pantsing these books, following the character and being interested in them in the way I would in short stories. It wasn’t until I worked with a developmental editor that I understood novels were not only about length but depth. It took me a long time — a couple of novels — to figure it out.”
At the same time, Erin realized she needed more to happen in her plot. That’s when she turned to mystery, brainstorming with her husband until they came up with a premise — a girl goes missing — that propelled her story forward.
“I figured out if I have a mystery, if I have something I’m trying to solve, there’s so much more momentum,” she says.
2) Consider the whole — Erin first published many of the stories in her two collections in lit magazines and other outlets. When she had 20 or so short stories under her belt, she began to wonder whether they would hold together as a book — and they did, but the process of choosing and arranging stories forced her to think about them as parts of a whole rather than complete by themselves.
“It was more methodical than I thought it would be,” she says of the mix-and-match process that resulted in her two collections so far with a third in the works. “It was really a balance of different craft aspects — point of view, tense, male narrator, female narrator. Trying to space them out so that thematically they weren’t too similar, one to the next, or have the same kind of emotional tenor at the end.”
Each collection has a different overall tone and theme.
“My first book was very much about relationships and navigating as you grow up — trying to figure yourself out in your twenties, trying to figure out how you get along with other people, make connections, find a family,” she says. “The next one was more about settling down, getting married, settling into your relationships, creating your own family. I have another collection now that is much more about becoming a mother. I think about them as the books of my twenties, my thirties, and my forties.”
3) Write more than you need — When you decide to assemble a collection, you’ll inevitably run into challenges. You want the stories to hold together thematically, but you don’t want them to be so similar the reader becomes bored.
“You go from looking at them as individual stories to thinking about them together as a cohesive whole,” Erin says. “One that you might love, love, love as a short story might not fit the book. If you have 20 stories, it’s easier to find what you need.”
When you start thinking in terms of what the book looks like rather than focusing on individual stories, you’ll be well on your way to creating a collection that satisfies both you and your readers.
4) Embrace crossover skills — Even if your ultimate goal is to produce a novel, writing short stories allows you to solidify your understanding of basic story structure and practice new techniques with a minimal investment of time and energy.
Interested in writing second person present tense? Try it in a short story. Need to get a feel for how to balance rising and falling action? Short stories are great opportunities to dissect how a beginning, middle, and end fit together.
“I have such a soft spot for short stories,” Erin says. “You can take risks and big swings and try something crazy. If you screw it up, you screw it up. There’s not that sense of commitment.”
Writing short stories also teaches discipline — the discipline of finishing what you start and crafting a complete story.
“The discipline translates across any kind of genre,” she says.
5) Create a reverse outline — Erin offers this tip especially for pantsers like her: outline your novel after you’ve written it. The kind of “follow where the character leads” approach that’s so fun in short stories can be a hindrance in novels.
“In a novel, you can write like that, and I do, but it takes so much revision then,” Erin says. “I don’t think I understood the scope of work that would go into a novel.”
Her compromise? The reverse outline. When Erin finishes a chapter, she tracks all the important information from that chapter in an Excel spreadsheet. She records the action that takes place, which timeline the chapter belongs in, the point of view, and any breadcrumbs she’s included that she can use in later chapters.
The method solves two challenges she’s found as a short story writer turned novelist: keeping a grasp on the big picture and recognizing her progress.
Over the course of writing 80,000 or 90,000 words, after all, even the most accomplished writer can drop plot threads from time to time.
“I needed a smaller way to look at the book,” Erin says.
The reverse outline helps by condensing the action of the book to its most elemental. Not only that, but she can see at a glance how much progress she’s made from day to day and month to month.
“The thing that was really hard for me transitioning to novels was there wasn’t that automatic sense of accomplishment,” Erin says. “You can write a short story in a weekend. I was ill prepared for how long it would take me to write a draft.”