How do you condense a story? First, you simmer it uncovered for several hours to reduce the volume, then…
Alas, it’s not that easy. And before someone waves a hand, paw, frond, or other appendage and protests, “But the Mad Genii always say write the story to the length it wants to be,” you’re right. Unless you are on a contract (8K words and no more, or a minimum word count for a novel-to-order). Or you have a story that alpha readers compare unfavorably to The Wheel of Time in terms of excessive digressions, side-trips, meals, and fashion.* You probably should have a tool in your toolbox for shortening or lengthening a story if you need to.
Leon Conrad’s post offers one option. You start with an event, all the details and color and thoughts, then strip away everything but the core. “Booth shoots Lincoln.” Drop the sounds, scents, Booth’s thoughts, everything but the most important piece of action. Then go to the next piece, and the next. From there, you have a batch of events you can link together into a story. Not enough words? Add description back in. Find something that doesn’t move the story forward? Trim it out. For those of us who plot as we go along, it can be a useful exercise to see how things move.
I’ve tried this with some of my “junk drawer” fiction, just to see how well it works for me. As many details as I add in, and as many little “toss away” scenes as find their way into my drafts, it’s not a bad technique for me. If I had a hard word cap, or needed to tighten up a wandering chapter, it really would help a lot. You can boil down events, check pacing, and so on more easily if you do something like this. It could also help me discover holes that need to be filled (“OK, so why does she give up at this point? Where is the motivation in the story? I forgot to include it in the manuscript? Oops!”)
You can also do the reverse, if you find yourself writing too short. Pull out the most important events and motivators. You might discover that your idea just isn’t story-able. I’ve got some of those in the “junk drawer,” cool tidbits that can’t stand on their own and don’t fit anything yet. You might also find that you need events, motivations, or details.
Hero leaves home -> goes to pub -> fights bad guy -> gets girl.
“Jerry unlocked the door and ushered Claire into his house. His hand and arm hurt, but not badly enough to keep him from returning her hug. ‘I’m glad you taught him a lesson’ she murmured between kisses.”
What’s missing here? A motivation for the fight, reaction of the others in the pub? It’s flash fiction, tells a story, but there’s a lot of room for expansion. Conrad, in the OP, uses the famous flash-fiction attributed to Hemingway as a starting place for expanding the story. He also points to movie trailers and posters to use for expansion ideas.
My stories generally have one main plot, and two subplots, or continuing arcs from earlier stories. But let’s take a novella that starts a series.
geologist explores for oil -> meets talking dog -> rejects advances of vampire -> rescues dog -> marries werewolf
OK, this is ONE of the two POV characters’ stories. I could probably drop the first part if I wanted to see only the major events. In fact, I might do something like this for the next story in the series, in order to see if I catch enough “beats” from the starter genre. You can list the necessary beats, then match the action to them. Again, this is if you want to do something like this. Most of us don’t stick with genre beats that closely. *waves paw*
Image Credit: Image by Tom from Pixabay
*I know that Jordan had reasons for the padding. I tapped an example I know. I’m sure you’ve read or watched things where you wonder “Has anything happened yet?” Aside from experimental films or theater (Waiting for Godot).
Mad Genius Club 
4 responses to “Writing Short and Long – Alma T. C. Boykin”
I’ve read enough SFF all my life that I can produce a short story by channeling my early-classic-SFF-stories memories, and I think mine are adequately appropriate in the mechanics of structure (i.e., “professional” – I have sold some), but really what I like best to consume is long-form, and always has been. I grant that it’s very useful to have more tools in one’s toolkit, but all my work is focused on refining my long-form specialty, rather than the more general craft on structure at various lengths.
I was lucky enough to blunder into the 4-act novel-structure layout with my first novel (after some initial weeks of producing pudding), and have devoted most of my craft work into refining how I do that. It’s like putting on a long comfortable warm coat. I know my sweet spot for length for each act, how to accommodate my “there and back again” endings, how to plan my tent poles, etc. It suits my perception of what makes the sort of story I like most to read.
I even have my Scrivener templates and wordcount tracking templates all set up with predictable word count proportions, etc., for external confirmation/tracking as I go along for the act-balancing for the overall work.
I’m not young, and I still have lots of stories to tell. Since I’m not constrained by writing to market (specs from others), I can write to please myself (and my readers), as long as I believe I am producing quality work. Doesn’t make me a good writer-for-hire, but I’m pleased with the structure of my work (to the degree that anyone is ever satisfied), and my comments on the writing process are generally from the insights I get from my own introspection, comparing my own work (with its frustrations) to the immense lifetime of work in the genre that I’ve read.
Craft is always good to learn and experiment with, but pay special attention to forms that “click” for you. The ultimate goal is production of story — polishing one’s tools is just one of the means, and you don’t have to master every tool just because it’s there.
Excellent points all! As you say, be aware of tools, but if something works, use that, be it type of writing, software, brain-storming method, or what have you.
Ideas are long or short according to how *sticky* they are. A short-short idea needs to be like a bearing ball: nothing else comes in.
Short stories, more than novels, need a clear grasp of “Why are you telling me this?” Who is telling the story, and to whom, and what is their purpose? I read a lot of stories that suffer from irrelevant digressions.
If you’re writing about a man being pursued by giant centipedes across a parking lot the readers shouldn’t be concerned with the history of the strip mall or a in-depth analysis of which stores are profitable, they should just want to know, “Do they get him, or does he get away?”
In speculative fiction in particular authors do a lot of in-depth worldbuilding and there is a temptation to share all that hard work with the reader, but most of it–while important to making the setting feel real–doesn’t directly concern the events of a particular story.
Knowing why the narrator is telling the story can help trim a story down to its essentials. It’s okay for the readers to not know the deep lore of the story world as long as they find out what happens to the main character in the end.