Don’t Stretch Out Your Shorts

Don’t Stretch Out Your Shorts

If you have a short story, keep it that way. Some writers try to take a short story and stretch it out into a novel, for a number of reasons; their agent says a novel would sell better; they already have several short stories and want to have a full book to their credit, or they just like the idea so much that they want to expound upon it. Don't do it. Leave the story in its own skin and start a new novel with a new idea.
Now don't get me wrong, there have been those occasions where a short story can be broadened and re-worked, fleshed out and developed into an 80k or so word novel. I'm not saying it's never happened. But it's rare ... very rare!
No, if it works well as a short story, then expanding it will only bleed it to anemia. Either that, or you'll wind up with a finished manuscript that has the feel of a bloated soap opera, and it will be a chore for your readers to get through it. We in the writing business have a term for just such a book: Slow. And if anyone ever tells you that your book was, "Kind of slow," allow me to act as translator, here. What they really mean is, "It bored me stiff."
Case in point. I read the short story, Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes. It was well written, almost genius in its conceptual delivery (it's told entirely in the first person by a mentally retarded man), and it holds your interest the whole way through.
And because of that, I read the full-length novel into which it was expanded from the same short story. To say the least, it suffered greatly. Lot's of filler. It even felt quite leaden in parts, weighed down with fat that seemed to be there for the sole purpose of longevity.
With the first simple and sweet original story, Keyes had a good thing. In some respects, a great thing. But he blew it. It was as if sometime after finishing 'Algernon,' he became ambitions for a novel. So, instead of writing an original one out of his imagination, he cannibalized one out of that sad and lovely short story. Fortunately for us – and him as well – he had published the smaller work before he pumped it up on steroids and made it into a muscle bound monster.
I'm being a bit dramatic here, but you get my meaning. In its shorter version, it was a wonderful little story, self contained, able to run all the way to the end on its own power. But as a novel, it struggles. It has its moments, I'll admit, but too many times, it sputters along, trying to gain momentum from ... somewhere, and finally, at the end, it drags itself over the finish line, exhausted and spent, while muttering through wheezing gasps, Why the hell did I ever do this in the first place?
A story has a life. That life, like all life, has a span. And that span is set in the heavens before it ever makes its way to the writers' pen and paper – or screen and document. The gods are the life-givers of stories. They hold them in their mystical hands as they peer down upon us, looking for whom they will deign to bestow their precious gift. We writers only record them (for more on this idea, see my column, Good Fiction Is Not Created, July 29, 2008). If we alter natural vitality of the written story too much because of word count limitations, or pressure from a potential buyer, or some such vulgar plangent from outside of our artistic mettle, we suffocate it. Lengthen it too much in order to satisfy an editor's demands, and we pull its joints out of their sockets, torturing it to death.
If you have short story, then you have a short story. If a novel, then a novel. Understand that the written tale is not a malleable hunk of clay that can be shaped into whatever you want, added to or subtracted from, depending on a publisher's commercial needs at the time. Your story is a world, with lives and people and flavors and colors and textures and dangers and joys and everything else that worlds have. Your story is bounteous. It's pulsating. It's waiting to be given life and breath, soil and atmosphere. And when the gods have chosen you as the omniscient creator of this cosmos, they have entrusted to you a precious gift, a gift with the hope that you will respect its organic beauty and spirit. Show them how seriously you take their offering, how reverent you hold such a unique and elegant gift. And don't disappoint them. If you do, you'll disappoint your readers as well, and more importantly ... you'll disappoint yourself.

Keck

Tuesday, April 28, 2009