In an essay for Lit Hub, Bill Cotter ponders when a short story should become a novel. “The list of novels that began their lives as short stories is long and well known,” he says. “It’s a genre in itself, almost: the novel that was born a short story.”
But how do you known when a short story is ripe for expansion? The answer is different for everyone, but Cotter suggests that a feeling of emptiness or being unfinished is one guide. You might have “a sense or feeling that the story one has written is somehow wanting, or maybe belongs to something larger,” he says. “The feeling, I imagine, could be a bit like homesickness, a disregulation in the innate understanding of where—or in what form—a story is to be most comfortable.”
Your short story might be a skeleton that requires more meat to bring it to life, Cotter suggests. Or it might be a single chapter that needs a novel to bring it to life. More practically, you need a toolbox and a roadmap to turn that short story into a novel. Cotter has done it, and offers the lessons he learned:
- Decide if the premise of your story is enough to sustain a novel once you start to expand, or a chapter of something that requires much more.
- Re-read your story and identify areas where you feel like something is missing. “These spots are ripe for examination and expansion,” Cotter says. Re-read your story and imagine richer lives for your characters, enough to populate a novel. Do the same with setting, asking how big your novel must be.
- Identify places where you skipped time. “When expanding a story into a novel, these summarized blocks of time are what get slid under the microscope, and the squirming details resolve,” Cotter notes.
- Examine your theme and consider how to expand it to form a tapestry for your novel.
- Consider how your conflict can stretch. “In a novel, the initial conflict metastasizes more slowly,” Cotter writes. “The tension builds by increments, page by page.”
- Add subplots that branch from your story’s plot.
- Test your process on an existing story. Find a story you love and see if you can expand its premise to something that would support a novel.
