Writing a Novel in Short Stories

"It’s the freedom of the novel-in-stories form that most excites me."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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In a recent comment thread here on Lit Mag News, I mentioned writing a novel in short stories. Becky replied and asked me to write an essay about my experience. Why did I write a novel in short stories? What do I like about this form? What’s hard about the approach? And what are the pitfalls writers should consider if they want to write novels in short stories? I’ll do my best to share what I’ve learned. 

Before I decided to focus on the short story, I wrote two novels. I did a bunch of writer’s conferences where you pay a lot of money to meet with agents and pretty much hear that you have to write what the market wants. I came out of those events angry and discouraged. Then on my own, I managed to get my novels into the hands of two big New York publishing houses, only to wait and wait two-and-a-half years for them to decline.

After my rejections for works that took over ten years of my life, I realized I still had a huge learning curve and that the novel would take too long to get the type of progress I wanted. I decided to switch to the short story. Because of its length, the short story requires a tremendous amount of discipline and control to create compression. There’s no room for ten pages about the little town or a chapter of backstory, or where they came from, or what they liked as a kid, or the history of some order or company.

The one thing a short story must do is stand on its own, period. Whether it is the plot of a larger story in something else you’re working on, or minor events around a character, it has to complete its own dramatic arc.

The cycle of creation, editing, rejection, and publishing can take anywhere from two weeks to a year or more. You can be working on one, two, or even half a dozen stories at a time. At some point, you know whether the story needs a major revision or to be put out to pasture. What is most important, however, is not really the story, but YOUR learning process ­– taking chances, developing your own voice. Fail, learn, learn, learn, revise, revise, revise, improve, improve, improve. There’s so much you can learn. In the short story, it all happens quickly – a luxury you do not have in the novel. 

This approach may appear to be more difficult than writing a chapter, but it’s not. Instead, it gives you clarity about the material: Does it have a dramatic arc? What is the realization? Does it stand on its own? What better way to test if the material is good than sending it out and see if literary magazines want to publish it?

For me, the novel-in-short-stories was not a conscious decision. It evolved. One story got published. I could not get one of the characters out of my mind. Then another story related to that character flooded my consciousness. Wrote it. Sent it out, got published. On to the next.

Now I felt that I needed to connect the stories and embrace the idea of the work as a bigger collection. Yet, I did not want to spend all my time with one character. I did not want to write a plotted novel. I already did two like that. I wanted to visit other realities. This approach gave me the freedom to explore. Half the stories evolved not by what was said, but by what was implied, the elephant in the room. Hemingway developed a technique he called the Iceberg Theory where he would only show the tip of the iceberg, but underneath he would develop the complexity of those character’s lives, causes and effects, so in a couple of sentences a whole world would be revealed. This concept allowed me to create mystery and go deeper into characters without revealing too much, suppressing outcomes, wooing the reader deeper into the story.

Many works promoted as novels are in reality short stories strung together by some common theme. Writers like Junot Díaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Carlos Fuentes, Don DeLillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Jennifer Egan have built their novels using the short story as their base.

I was lucky enough that my mentors came from the discipline of short story. Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce Carol Oates wrote short stories, then moved to the novel, still well aware of the timing, structure, and compression that made their short stories sing. Junot Díaz and Jennifer Egan switch not only POV, but also time, place, and location. They find a flow. Each story has a separate dramatic arc. You go into their intimate secrets, fears, and then you switch to another person. You dig deep. Instead of feeling fractured, you inhabit that world and see where it takes you.

I tend to create my stories following Gordon Lish’s definition of story which is: obstacles to the character’s desires, thus creating tension that leads to conflict. From here you can decide to create a plotted novel, or a thematic or character-driven one, where instead of a central plot, lives, events, situations intersect and affect outcomes. My characters wrote their own stories. Like method acting, or let’s call it method writing, they became real regardless of what I as the author may have had in mind. We shared long mental sessions arguing, complaining, desiring, lusting, crying, loving and responding to their own scenarios. Whenever I sat down to write, they took over and the words flowed like taking dictation from God.

So what advice do I have for writers attempting this form or thinking about trying something besides a novel?

I workshop everything I do to get a better feel whether I am going in the right direction or not.  That means you reciprocate, reading and critiquing a multitude of short stories and chapters from novels.

I’ve been doing this for over fifteen years, and I have hundreds of critiques under my belt. Many writers’ problems start when a chapter in the novel doesn’t quite work, and the novel feels disconnected from there on. They may not realize the issue for a year or two and it’s only after finishing the novel and they are six months into editing (or workshopping) that they finally (maybe) realize the issue.

When you are writing short stories, what does not work, you just put aside, and keep writing. You don’t have to follow the rules of the novel, stringing chapters, but the rules of the short story: compression, compression, compression. To do that you hint at imbalances, messiness, pedestrian details, dark corners of the characters (you can do all that to your novel as well but in the short story it’s critical). Use the Iceberg Theory, so even saying a particular expression reveals so much about the characters or what they’ve been through. Finish by finding some realization (not necessarily even answers). As long as they can stand on their own without the rest of the novel, they are good. Send them out. The stories will tell you where to go.

As for pitfalls, agents may tell you that the work is too fragmented. They want to spend more time with just one character.  They want to empathize more deeply with the protagonist. They want a stronger central plot. Meanwhile, you read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and plenty of other writers that use the form and realize readers don’t need the traditional novel structure. These works have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards. If anything, it’s the freedom of the novel-in-stories form that most excites me.

Some writers may also feel daunted. They are familiar with the easy flow of chapters, and that whatever happens there it will be revealed in later chapters. The idea of a dramatic arc may feel difficult. Fear not, though: a dramatic arc can be as simple as a realization that allows the story to stand on its own.  You are not required to connect it to the next story through a plot. It may be as simple as a theme. Take for instance, Junot Diaz’s theme in some of his novels: how individuals in a family deal with leaving a country torn apart by a dictatorship, only to find themselves alone and empty in the land of the free even though now they are safer. 

When you commit to a novel, you dream, wake up, breathe, sleep, and eat THAT novel.  You can spend six months or as it was my case ten years entangled in that weave, drawing timelines, researching historical trees, identifying events, charting character connections, writing linear scenes, and creating causes and effects. If the weave is not working together, it falls apart.

Instead, I dream a short story and let it rip. If it has legs, it becomes two. If I am tired, I write something else. In the meantime, the story is workshopped, edited and sent out. If it gets published, the material is validated and I have readers that believe in the work.

Because a short story has to stand on its own, it alleviates the need to resolve a bigger plot later on. You do not have to connect all the dots with all the stories. In the novel, one plot point weaves into another and another, which leads to the climax (at least traditionally). In the short story compilation, it doesn’t have to add to that, because it tends to be more character- and theme-driven. This reminds me what the editor of The Florida Review said in one of Becky’s interviews: “A good story leaves you thinking about it for days.” And here you’re taking all those lingering thoughts into the next story.

If you like writing novels and are getting published or successfully self-publish your own work, by all means, continue to do that. But if your novel is stuck, maybe try an experiment. Take one of your chapters and add a few elements that will allow it to complete a dramatic arc.  I did that with a chapter of each of my novels. Lo and behold, those stories got published.

If you want a faster publication process and shorten the learning curve (without losing the intensity of developing your craft), maybe the novel-in-short-stories will work better for you.

Here are some great novels made of short stories:

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Please add to this list, if you have favorites of your own.

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