So you’re a short story writer. You’re happy with your craft, and you already know what a short story is:

• a very brief story with immediate point (Concise Oxford English Dictionary)
• a prose narrative of shorter length than the novel, esp. one that concentrates on a single theme (Collins English Dictionary)
• “one of the most elusive forms… how long (or short) is short?” (A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory).

It’s not a novella (generally up to 40,000 words) or a novelette (typically over 7,500 words – 19,000 words). Awards make it all the more mind-boggling when guidelines start talking about “long story” (over 15,000 words). Or you find that a “novella” starts from 17,500 words, where another competition lists “short fiction” as a category for under 30,000 words… Some human is making these decisions, and we’re not that consistent.  

But you’re not worried about all this because you write short stories. Sweet spot maybe 2,000 – 5,000 words. Sometimes you dabble at flash fic or sudden fiction or short-short stories… something less than 1,000 words.

On the New York Times website, in his 1981 article “A Storyteller’s Shoptalk”, author Raymond Carver speaks of his trouble in concentrating attention on long narratives, hence his focus on poems and short stories. He describes his approach to writing the short form as “Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on”.

Another writer, Paul Ariss said short stories “come to visit for a while, take you somewhere you didn’t expect and then put you back where you started before you’d even realised you were gone”. And author Alistair Canlin said this of the short story: “you can throw the reader straight into a world, and pull them out again just as quickly, leaving them asking questions, and constantly thinking.”

You don’t need anyone to tell you this—you know what a short story is.

You also know what a short story is not.

It’s not incomplete or fragmentary—a short story is complete in its incompleteness.

It’s not an unfinished novel. Stuff that.

It’s not practice for a novel—unless you want it to be?

It’s not easier to write than a novel—a short story can be a pocket-sized epic that takes sheer brilliance to write.

Edgar Allan Poe defined the short story as a work whose author must first have “conceived with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect”.

Maybe you’ve even won or been a finalist in awards with your short story, you’ve been killing it in anthologies—as in editors have you on speed dial, critics raving about your short story (you kinda hog the lot, you’re getting a bit self-conscious about it—maybe not, it’s fucking awesome). And you have a short story collection or three… But your mate, your family, maybe a literary agent… has been on your case, as in: “So where’s that novel?”

And imposter syndrome is creeping in, and you feel you gotta write that effin novel.

Or maybe you’ve written a short story you like so much, you want it as a starting point for a novel. Perhaps more characters are popping up, too many to contain in a short story. Or maybe you want to stretch the story—by timeline or theme or view point. The start is the same, the closing is the same, but the inside of the story is becoming longer. It demands more history, more world-building, a deeper look. Now you really need that novel.

But short stories are your strength. You don’t want to get entangled in a tortured story or a runaway plot. What if the short story is just what it is—the point of it could be lost in expanding it. Who wants a bloody novel? You do. What if the short story has told itself out: do you really need that novel? Yes, bloody yes, every inch of you shouts.

But you do love the energy in a short story—yes, Carver: Get in, get out. Don’t linger.   

So what if you could retain all that you love about the short story, and still write that novel? What if you could write about a moment in time, something experimental and decentralized, something flexible, economic, dynamic, mimetic, metaphoric, immediate, intense—and it’s still a novel?

This is how it happens: What if you wrote your novel story-by-story, using your strength as an author of short stories?

In this model, you could approach each chapter or section as a short story with a beginning, a middle and an end. You could approach each character event—however long or short—as a short story with a beginning, a middle and an end. You could shift point of view, even narrative voice, each shift or voice acting as its own beginning, middle and end.

This approach means writing your novel like a short story cycle with recurring characters, shared events, a shared world… and carefully embedding each “short story” in a continuance—it’s a self-contained piece, yet formed as part of a network of associations within a longer, cohesive whole. 

Your novel will contain linked layers, tales that form a pattern, unified by recurrence of characters, places, dominant motifs… Your characters will have a connection with each other. You will sequence your narratives, adapt them to act together like a novel while remaining composite, episodic.     

Your success will depend on the clever placement of your short stories within the novel. How you add layering, linking them with whatever cohesiveness that holds them together. Voila! There’s your novel of embedded vignettes—each individually crafted with its own beginning, middle and end, each layer amounting to a sum of the whole. You’re writing a novel in your sweetest spot: get in, get out, with vignettes that come to visit for a while, take the reader somewhere they didn’t expect, then put them back. You and the reader are engaged, asking questions, constantly discerning.

If you’re thinking this can never work (!), take a look at Claiming T-Mo.

Snatching the power of the short story, I applied a model of stories-within-a-story to write a novel that could get away with ‘hiding’ short stories inside a novel—whether it was the story of Salem or Silhouette or Myra or Tempest or T-Mo or Odysseus. What if I had another story of Novic? I could add it as a prequel to the novel. A novella, a novelette, a long story, short fiction…

I wonder, too, whether Michael Ondaatje adopted this pattern of multiplicity in his award-winning novel Divisadero—made of interlinked stories. You can nearly read each narrative—whether it is the story of Claire or Anna or Coop or Rafael or Lucien—on its own, and it’s related to another. You can read starting his novel anywhere because, due to their standalone nature, the order in which you read the stories or parts might not matter. Check out this scene in Divisadero, at Lucien Segura’s wedding. Marie-Neige—the woman who is not his wife—pulls a note from her cotton sleeve and pushes it into his breast pocket:

Tell me that is not an embedded vignette. Sudden fiction.

This form of writing is experimental. It is risky. To successfully apply it, you need a clear chapter-by-chapter breakdown or synopsis. You need to know where to carefully embed your vignettes or short stories, to integrate them and layer them into the composite.

Writing story by story, you’re creating in a discipline already familiar, while layering your novel with characters, timelines, motifs and interplay—a sum of the parts.

UPCOMING LIVE WORKSHOPS FOR NOVELISTS