It’s time for an update!
Intro: The Little Story that Could
As the new year started, a friend of mine challenged me to set a goal for myself, and achieve it. I broke out my notes from leadership trainings and Scout camps, reviewed my “SMART” Goals, and set out to write a short story.
A quick Google search will reveal that any written project, like a story, should follow a certain word count to be accepted by publishing companies under specific parameters. It basically helps them know how much a story should be worth to print and sell. Companies will refer to a short story as any literary work with between 2,000 and 5,000 words–basically the length of an essay. Certainly doable! I said I’d complete the project by the end of January 2025…
After my draft exploded into nearly 50,000 words, I knew I had a novella on my hands. I finished the draft on February 27th.
So, what’s the logic? Couldn’t the story have just sat at 2k, or even 5k words and have been ok?
The “Too Long; Didn’t Read” is: yes, I could have.
The “Much Longer; Here for the Journey” is: stories are all about what you want the reader to experience. I want my readers–I want YOU to live long enough in this world to truly believe it, to come to know the main heroes and their supporting cast of characters. I want you to feel their hearts race in the face of danger, and thrill with them as the rise triumphant over their trials. For me, 2k-5k words won’t cut it.
Making a Story 10 Times Better
So, what principles guide an author in making a decision like this? Why make my short story of 2k words into a behemoth of nearly 10 times more material?
For me, there’s only a few priorities: character growth, engaging and unique worlds, and meaningful adversity.
I focus my story, the reason you buy the book in the first place, on characters that are fun to watch. For me, the best stories are the ones that follow characters you can’t ignore, can’t look away from, and can’t resist seeing through to the end of their journey. That journey means they have to go somewhere crazy, and become something more, and that’s actually the next two steps to writing a good story: somewhere, and something.
The ‘somewhere’ here is what many creatives refer to as ‘worldbuilding,’ literally the rules you set up to build-your-story-world. This is where fantasy and sci-fi writers get to have the most fun–they get to make up the cool things that are most important to the story’s stakes and tension. Do you gain super powers by swallowing an elixir of metal shavings and burning it in your core? Can you destroy the most evil being in the known world by returning his precious jewelry to a volcano? Does the intense afterburner from a starship cause your body to compress and your blood vessels to burst? It’s all there, and it’s all going to add risk in living in this world you’re creating.
The ‘something more’ speaks about the inner journey the character goes through. This has more to do with the external adversities the characters face, fail or overcome, and how they deal with it personally. Who knew that taking a ring and dropping it in a screaming volcano would give you PTSD and permanent physical dismemberment and scarring? But wait, aspiring reader, don’t be fooled! Those two are NOT the internal struggle of the small-folk in question. These are simply the mental and physical consequences of their journey, the scars they take home. The internal struggle of the characters should always ask a question that’s set up by the story’s earliest moments. In this case, the question might be “Will the small-folk resist the pull of the evil ring?” We see these things illustrated by the choices made by the character, and the consequences of those things result in mental and physical signs–scars.
But not every story ends with a scar. Many of the stories kids watch are all about an internal change, completely avoiding a pairing of physical scarring to an internal change or ‘lesson.’ It all depends on the rules of your world, and how you introduce risk and reward through your narrative.
Anyway, I’m gonna get back to editing. Just thought I’d let you know the book’s second draft should be ready as we begin May 2025.
Stay tuned!