How to Pivot from Writing Short Stories to Novels

After I typed the dramatic “The End” on the last page of my first novel draft, I printed the whole thing out, held it in my arms, and weighed myself. I didn’t know at that point if the book was any good, but I knew it weighed 2.2 pounds. I’d been writing short stories for nearly a decade by that point and was still shocked by the enormity, the sheer weight, of a novel.

It took me another decade-plus before I actually published a novel, and in that time, I’ve learned a few things that I wish I’d known all those years ago, standing on the scale with my dreams in my hands. Had I known then what I know now, I could have shaved some years off of my apprenticeship as I transitioned from stories to novels, and my hope is that passing them on can do that for you.

Find software that works for you

This tip is an easy one that requires no creative output and also involves one of my favorite things: online shopping. One of the difficult things about moving from a short story to a novel is the sheer scope. In short fiction, you might have some backstory and details to juggle, but if you can’t remember something exactly, you only need to review twenty pages and not three hundred to find out if it was raining earlier in the day or what year someone graduated from high school. If you have software designated for longer projects, you can easily store facts, timelines, scene sketches, or anything else you might need in one place.

I use Scrivener, which costs $49 and also offers a student/academic discount. You can use it across multiple computers, and it will absolutely make your life easier. In Scrivener, you can create a manuscript for a novel and break it down in whatever way makes sense: by chapter, scene, section, and so on. In my current manuscript, I have folders for each section and, within each folder, files for each chapter labeled by the action. I can easily glance at the table of contents to the left of the manuscript and see what I have where. I can also do a quick description for each chapter in Index Card mode and look at those as if pinned to a corkboard, moving them around (as well as the full chapter) in the manuscript with the click of a button. There’s a place to store research, imported emails, pictures, and pdfs. In Revision Mode you can indicate edits with a different font color and without the mess of Track Changes. While I probably don’t use 96 percent of the bells and whistles available, it has been worth every penny.

Other software options include LivingWriter, which looks similar to Scrivener but has a monthly charge of $9.99 after a free trial; Final Draft for a whopping $199.99; and Storyist, which is a reasonable $59 but is only available for Mac. But if none of these float your boat, goodness knows there are more options out there for you to discover.

Study different novel structures

One of the things that makes short stories so fun is how inventive they can be in structure. There’s Freytag’s Pyramid, with its rising action, climax, and falling action, but there are also stories that use more experimental forms like power points or texts or all dialogue or lists. This kind of experimentation is one of the boons of the genre, but when you’re dealing with a novel, especially for the first time, it might be easier to go with a structure that’s a bit tested that will help you discern how to move a novel from beginning to end.

I think most creative writers bristle at the idea of a formula, and please know that’s not what I’m recommending, but it is incredibly helpful to frame your thinking in terms of a structure you can follow. For me, structure was one of the hardest transitions from short story writing to novels, but it was also one of the most crucial steps to finally writing a novel that held together and moved forward at a reasonable pace.

Some popular structures include the three-act, the W, the braided narrative, hero’s journey, and so on. (A quick Google search will find you more!) For instance, a typical W structure, my favorite, only has five basic moves: the inciting incident that sets the plot in motion, the first turn with consequences the character can’t reverse, the second triggering incident at the halfway point, the second turn, and the resolution. Thousands of thousands of novels that all look incredibly different follow this structure. It reminds me of what my dad said when someone said he looked like Harrison Ford: “I guess so. Two arms, two legs.” Only five beats still gives you plenty of space to make it your own but helps you think more forwardly in terms of rising action.

And if none of the structures you find feel like a fit for your work, by all means, outline a novel you love and consider how that author did it. If you honestly can’t think of one novel that fits your creative vision, maybe sit with that for a moment and ask yourself some hard questions about audience. Think of using structure not as writing formulaic fiction but more like glancing at a blueprint for a Craftsman bungalow or farmhouse before you invest in a hammer and some nails.

And if none of the structures you find feel like a fit for your work, by all means, outline a novel you love and considerhow that author did it. 

Once you’ve identified a structure, use it to break down the novel

Once you decide on a structure, I also recommend thinking in terms of targets throughout the story. When I start writing, I’m not aiming for the end of the book. I set my eyes on the first real turn in the story, which I estimate to be at about a quarter of the way. If a novel is three hundred pages and I’m following the W structure, there will be a big turn at roughly page seventy-five, with consequences that will set the characters on a new path. I once read that the average novel has sixty scenes, and by thinking of it in terms of quarters, I am already dealing with only thirteen more scenes between the opening scene and the first turn. Of course it won’t end up being fifteen scenes exactly, but this is just enough for me to trick my brain into seeing the next stepping-stone beyond where I stand.

Figure out where the novel ends in time

Joan Silber says in her book The Art of Time in Fiction, “Where a teller begins and ends a tale decides what its point is, how it gathers meaning.” If you end when the couple finds happiness, it is a different book than if you end two years later after they’ve broken up. Decide where in time your novel ends and what will be addressed. This is different than knowing the ending, and much easier, and will give you a sense of how to pace the book.

For instance, if you write a book that starts on a Monday and ends the following Sunday, that’s seven days covered in three hundred pages, so say an average of about forty-three pages per day if you space each day evenly. But, if you know you’re going to follow the three generations of Iowa farmers from 1920 to 2000, that is a very differently paced novel. If you covered each day in forty-three pages, your book would be over a million pages long, and, no matter how brilliant, that’s a lot to ask of a reader. Knowing where my book was going to end in time before I began helped me think about how I would cover that much time—what I’d summarize, what’d I’d skip altogether, and what would demand focus and exploration. It helped me figure out where to spend my words, something I already thought about in stories because I only had twenty pages to capture it all. With a novel, I still didn’t know what would happen in that time—even with a mystery, I wouldn’t know who would have done it, for instance—but I would know when (if not how) things would conclude.

Make an outline, either before or after you write

I quickly found with novels that just writing wherever the story took me ended in too many detours and one-way roads, but I was too daunted yet to think about outlining ahead of time. What I came up with was the post-writing outline: Once I’ve written a scene, I add it to my outline in Excel. Each chapter is a row in the spreadsheet, and, depending on the novel, I might have columns for point of view, timeline, location, etc., to help me keep things straight. What’s most crucial are the columns for action (what happens in the chapter), information (what the reader learns), breadcrumbs (things I might use later on), and changes (things I need to change once I’ve realized more about the story). These help me to see the book at a glance and also start planning for revisions.

At the end of every writing session, I try to sketch out the next scene or chapter so I’m not left facing the blank page without a plan when I return. Not only does this make the next writing session less intimidating; I’m convinced that as I go about my day, that idea is marinating, getting more flavorful while I walk the dogs or drive to work or make dinner.

Think in scene, not sentence

Cathy Day’s advice in a novel-writing class really stuck with me: “Think in scene, not sentence.” I had to move away from the preciousness of language and start to believe in the solidity of scene—to see the building blocks not in words, but in actions, stacking on top of each other.

This advice built naturally out of short story writing as well. I long ago discovered one of the best ways to identify weaknesses in my stories was to break them down by scene and action, such as pgs 1–3, Nick goes hunting with Tom, pgs 4–7, Nick accidentally shoots Tom. I could then identify if enough happened in each scene and whether or not they built one to the next. For instance, in the example above, do I really need scene 1 where they go hunting, or is that obvious in scene 2 (because they’re already hunting) and I can cut pages 1 to 3? Applying this to novels was similar, just on a larger scale.

I find writing first-draft novel scenes a delicate balancing act between including enough detail that I understand the characters, setting, and situation, and not getting bogged down in the specific language. Some days, I admit it: I want to include lots of detail because it helps my word count. I might not need that hundred-word description of a plant in the corner, but that’s something for Future Erin to figure out, not Present Erin, who is all smug about those hundred words.

Keep in mind that chapters aren’t stories

Benjamin Percy talks in his craft book Thrill Me about the difference between novel chapters and stories, saying of his unpublished books, “I treated chapters like short stories, introducing and resolving trouble in fifteen pages . . . [and] the containment, the stand-aloneness of my chapters, gave my books a stop-start quality that destroyed any sense of momentum.” It took me four practice novels to realize that chapters are the opposite of stories: There’s a resonance at the end of many short stories that lends itself to contemplation, but with a chapter, you don’t want a reader closing the book and contemplating. You want them unable to put the book down.

Not every chapter has to be a cliff-hanger, but there should be something beckoning the reader forward. The best thing you can do for this is to look at chapters in an unputdownable book you love. Figure out what works on you as a reader and translate that to your work.

Concentrate on depth as well as length

I had to learn that length isn’t the only difference between a novel and a short story; there’s also depth. If I had turned the editor’s comment “Can you let us in a bit more here?” into a drinking game, I would have been drunk by chapter two.

For instance in Deer Season, my first novel, I had a scene where Alma, my protagonist, goes to the grocery store and talks to two younger women she doesn’t really like because she thinks they are vapid and gossipy. In the scene she is irritable with them, puts them down, and at the end we see her get a little comeuppance. It worked well as a short story scene—the reader would understand who Alma is in that moment—but for a novel, the reader needed to understand how Alma had gotten here. She’d lived in this small town for fourteen years by this point and was still seen as an outsider; she’d tried to follow the town’s unwritten rules by doing her hair a certain way and attending church meetings, and still they wouldn’t accept her. What were social assets when she lived in Chicago—brains and a college degree—were considered liabilities in Gunthrum, where her education was taken as uppity. All that needed to be explored in the novel.

In short stories, so much is implicit—the histories between characters, the ambiguity of emotion that’s expressed by action—but in a novel, I had to learn to open my characters up and see what was behind their actions as far back as childhood or even intergenerational trauma. In every scene now I think, What is really going on here for the character? What is being expressed? As a reader, I expect to be let behind the curtain in a novel, and as the novelist, I have the job to make that happen for the reader.

Remember: You’re writing a draft of a novel

At this point you might be looking at all my references to other writers and concluding I have nothing new to say. Let that be my final lesson, writer, and let’s make it a twofer. First, you do not need to figure this all out on your own. You are never creating in a vacuum. And second, do not put the pressure on yourself to write the perfect, most original novel. You are not cheating if you use a preordained structure or an outline or the pithy advice of someone who screwed up writing a novel before you. Making the leap from stories to a novel is hard enough, so don’t make it any harder on yourself. One of the things I love so much about short stories is that inspiration feels like it can strike in a moment, the whole draft written in one blissful day, but a novel takes time and patience and commitment of a different sort, and that relationship, while not as sexy, has its own forms of reward.

I often think about that girl who stood on the scale with her novel in her arms: 2.2 pounds and a year’s worth of work. That girl would be heartbroken to learn that novel would never see the light of day, and neither would the next or the next or the next. But she would be impressed with her tenacity, her sheer doggedness to keep expanding what she’d learned from short stories and applying it to a longer form.

It wasn’t until my fifth novel that I actually found a publisher, and that book, Deer Season, just won a 2022 Edgar for Best First Novel by an American Author. I couldn’t have written it without the ones before it, and I wouldn’t have gotten to novels except through short stories.

I’m confident not every piece of advice here will resonate with all readers, but take what seems helpful and bring your novel into existence, any way you can.

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