Making it longer

I've become pretty good at "short". Not just short stories, very very short stories. When I begin writing, because I have trained myself in flash, which means the process as well as the end product, I already have in mind that I will finish, will wrap up in this session. After 20 minutes, I will have a complete story in under 500 words.

This kind of writing trains you not to send out tendrils of plot in directions that you don't want to go in. It trains you to start closing in almost as you begin to open. There are few characters, there are no digressessions. This doesn't mean - as I wrote in my essay on flash writing for the Salt Guide to Writing the Short Story, which Vanessa Gebbie is editing and which is due for publication in August and should be fabulous - that a flash story has no depth, no plot, no description. Great flash somehow does manage to do all that in a tiny space. Just read Vestal Review, Elimae, Wigleaf, Pank magazine for excellent examples of how it's done.

But... something longer? I need to re-train myself. It's been two years or so since I've written a "full-length" short story, whatever that really means. I guess, over 2000 words. I'm out of the habit of creating those tendrils, of opening out instead of closing in. And I'd like to get that back. I'd like to be able to do that, because I miss the process of writing something longer - writing a section at a time, stopping, knowing not to push it, knowing that the next section will come when it is ready, in hours, days or weeks. Trusting that your character will tell you what happens next. Revising. Reworking. Thinking about structure.

After all the agent talk, I was inspired by a writing friend's comment (thank you, Joel!) to think about whether I might be able to go for 50,000 words instead of 500. I don't want to use the word "novel", because to me that implies something about one main arc of narrative, one large plot, and I don't right now have that kind of thing bubbling up in me. But a book-length work that is not separate stories? Some kind of set of pieces that connect, that overlap? Not stories that are forced to link, but something written as a non-traditional kind of longer work. Why not? I can still champion the short story even if I write long, right?

There is something I've been working on, a character I am intrigued by that I have been "following around", for the purposes, so I thought til a few days ago, of writing a screenplay. I can't write a screenplay from scratch, I don't plot. So I thought I'd get to know my character in a way I do know how to do, and find out what happens. But turns out that I rather like what is happening, the tone of the narrator that has turned up, the meanderings, and we are 2500 words in.... Now, the idea of a novel about my character is very very daunting. But somehow Joel's comment made me see how I can send out tendrils, expanding it story-wise without losing what I love about the short story: nothing unnecessary, no padding.

I started some of that wandering off the path this morning, and wrote 307 words. For me - that's a lot! To write 307 new words without finishing something. So, a while to go from 2800 to 50,000. But the door has been opened, the possibilities are there.

To Plot or Not

So, I've taken the plunge. I've signed up for NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don't know what this is, it may sound like torture. It stands for National Novel Writing Month, and the original idea was to stimulate writers who don't think they can write a novel, setting them the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. The point is that these are not 50,000 good words, they are just 50,000 words. This is to show people they can produce quantity, and give them a rough draft to work on. You upload your daily writing to the site, which counts them automatically (no-one else sees your writing) and keeps a tally. Anyone who makes it to 50,000 is a "winner".

I signed up two years ago. Me, who has never written anything longer than 6000 words. I wrote a few hundred, and spent all my time in the forums moaning about how I couldn't write anymore. Now, when I seem to be comfortable with stories of less than 700 words, I decided it was time to push myself.

This time, though, I have a support group: six or seven of my fellow Fiction Workhouse members are taking the plunge together and egging each other on. We don't start til nov 1st, but already I feel calmer.

I actually have a main character already, someone from one of my short stories who intrigues me. But that is as far as I get. I have no plot, no novel-length story idea. And that terrified me. I found a few others on the NaNoWriMo forums who are in the same position but most people seem to have plotted their novel out. I was panicking a little.

Until this morning.

Until this morning I was firmly in the camp of the non-plotters. I've never plotted a short story before writing it. Hmm, but then I've never written more than 6000 words. However, today, I was shown a whole new way of working. I am taking an online screenwriting class, with the idea that we all write a full-length screenplay. I have had an idea in my head for a few years - but just an image, a beginning, a concept. Nothing else. One main character. I've tried over the years to just start writing the script and seeing what happened. But that just didn't work.

Today, however, I read the 2nd lesson that the instructor posted online, and in half an hour, following the guidelines, wrote an entire synopsis/Story Map of my film, with beginning, middle and end. The story unfurled as I wrote. Now I have the plot. And it may well be that the plot will change radically as I write the actual script, but I have somewhere to start.

I thought this might help with the novel, as well. I don't know - since I have never written a novel - which parts of this are specific to films, but I have a feeling it's quite similar, just adjust the terminology accordingly. So, tomorrow I will have a go. We'll see if I get anywhere.