Is There a Novel Here? Or How to Turn Your Short Story into a Novel

Is There a Novel Here? Or How to Turn Your Short Story into a Novel

In my early twenties, I’d written a very bad novel trying to imitate Faulkner’s  As I Lay Dying. (Warning to young writers: Do not try to imitate Faulkner!)  So I decided I needed to learn my craft and began writing short stories exclusively.  It was a great way to learn the basics of story-telling—writing effective scenes, using dialogue, developing characters, creating a vivid voice, and building a narrative with coflict.  I put aside novel writing for over fifteen years and wrote hundreds of stories and published over fifty in literary journals and national magazines.  Don’t get me wrong. I loved writing and reading stories, and it goes without saying the form itself is as legitimate and powerful as the novel.  However, for me it was also a wonderful training ground for novel-writing.  I’d suggest to all beginning writers to start by learning how to write short stories.

Jump forward twenty years. After publishing my first two novels, I was searching for a subject for my next novel.   A short story of mine called “Nights” had recently won a prize in a regional newspaper contest and was published.  It was about a doctor in a small mountain town in North Carolina.  By day he worked as an OB/GYN, while at night he served as medical examiner.  As the story opens, the narrator is called out in the middle of the night to a murder scene.  He rides in a police cruiser with his long-time friend, the sheriff, to the crime scene where a woman has shot her lover.  When they arrive, they find the woman holding onto her baby and refusing to give it up.  After talking with the mother, the doctor finally convinces her to surrender her child, on the condition he take the baby home with him until social services can intervene. The last scene has the doctor getting into his dead son’s bed with the sleeping baby; the story ends as a meditation on the son’s death many years earlier juxtaposed with the arrival of a new baby in his bed.

I sent the story along to my agent with no intent other than to show him I wrote short stories, too.  After reading it, my agent, always frugal with compliments, said he really liked the narrator’s voice.  He also surprised me by responding, “Is there a novel here?”

When I was writing short stories, I never considered any one of them as novel material (though, as I point out later in the essay, several of my stories had character and thematic links).   With short stories, I only needed a frail thread of an idea, an overheard conversation, or a memory for me to jump in and begin writing.  Each one was conceived as a separate story with a beginning, middle, and end, and when I finished it, I went on to the next story.  In contrast, with my first two novels, I began by doing a great deal of research on the subject, then sketching out a very rough outline, followed by a kind of mapping out or story-boarding of the novel’s key scenes, plot points, and character arcs, and lastly writing long sections/scenes that would flesh out the novel.  While I know that many writers have turned short stories into novels, I wondered what my agent saw in the story that I didn’t.  Despite what Faulkner said about The Sound and the Fury starting from the simple image of a young girl in muddy bloomers shimmeying down a drainpipe, I knew I’d need a whole lot more to go on before I could start writing a novel.

After a while of pondering (and cursing my agent for leading me on what I thought a fool’s errand), I had something of a revelation. The story wasn’t an outline for a novel, nor a condensed version of one, but it was the inciting incident—the woman’s “murder” of her lover.  It served as a kind of roadmap for the first quarter of the novel.  I expanded and deepened each scene (there were about five scenes in the story) to become full chapters.  I was able to write the first 75 pages faster than I’d ever written before.  The story seemed to flow out of me in a torrent.  I submitted the opening part of the novel to my agent and was surprised to get an offer of a book deal within weeks.  The rest of the novel went more slowly, but the opening pages had established a firm foundation for me.  Within a year, I finished the novel and sent it off to my agent.  It was published as A Dream of Wolves.  Later it drew interest from a producer who bought the screen rights several times.

In my fiction writing classes, I’d sometimes teach both my short story and novel, having my students analyze the relationship between the two.  How were they structurally and thematically related?  How did the story evolve into the novel.  Later, a talented MFA student who’d read both the short story and novel proposed for her third-term critical project an analysis of writers who took an earlier story of theirs and developed it into a novel.   She also focused on how writers used their stories to transform them into novels.  Writers as various as Sandra Cisneros, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, and Alice Munro have turned earlier short stories into novels. Several of Louise Erdrich’s stories became novels, or novels-in-stories.  Salinger’s “I’m Crazy” was later used in his Catcher in the Rye, while Virginia Wolff’s story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Stree” was expanded into Mrs. Dalloway.  One primary reason that authors—myself included—turn a story into a novel is that they feel they haven’t said all they wanted to in the story.  Some use the short story only as a thematic element.  Others take the characters in the short story, often family members, and continue developing them and their story in longer fictional forms.  Still others use the story as an outline to expand and deepen.  Finally, some, like Erdrich, expand their initial story into a novel-in-stories.

Recently, I had occasion to reread a couple of stories I’d published years ago centered on a disfunctional family.  Many of the stories involved a young boy and his carpenter father.  In this cycle of stories, I’d focused on the complex relationship between the son and his alcoholic, abusive, racist father.  Unlike in my earlier example of turning a story into a novel by using it as an outline for the first part of the novel, in this case there wasn’t much of a plot to go by.  Each story’s plot in this cycle was different. Instead, these stories formed the basis of the relationship between father and son I wanted to pursue more fully, and, I felt, with greater command of my material.  Focuing on this relationship and having the father take his son to work one day became the opening chapters of my new novel Skunktown (Regal House, 2027).

Now I wonder if more of my earlier stories could serve as the seed of future novels.  I’d also be curious to know how many writers out there have used their own short story or stories as the basis or inspiration for a novel? What was your process?  Are there any other writers of stories who would be interested in turning them into novels?  I’d love to hear from you.