I am nearly finished with another “short story” that has definitely, no turning back, gone and grown itself into a novelette. It passed 9K words yesterday and I will definitely need another 1K at least to bring it home. I am starting to suspect that I either need shorter ideas or to just bite the bullet and write a damn novel already. I did start a “Chapter One” of a novel not long ago – but I consider that more twiddling than a strategic focus right now.
Given everything I am working on, to count something else this substantial as finished (well, “drafted”, anyway) is going to feel richly-satisfying. And it carries on a highly-productive phase – I finished the full-length stage play February 6th, and the prior novelette on March 9th. I should complete this in the next 2-3 days at most. I am working on a solo stage show for my actress friend Norma Jean, building an hour-long script based on interviews with her about her life, and I have about 20% of that drafted, which means it is highly-likely I’ll have a full draft of it in May. It almost tempts one to ask what major project I’ll finish in June. There are available candidates.
These days, though, I must regularly ask myself not just what I am writing, but what am I going to do with it once it is complete. Awhile back I set the goal to have enough prose fiction to publish a decent-sized collection, offer it for sale to friends and family, and then see if I can’t sell a few to strangers on the back of that. Not to get rich, but just to build a track record. With the finish of this novelette, I will be just two or three shorter pieces away from enough to put out a collection the size of a short novel. And those two or three pieces are already in-motion.
But that raises larger questions about whether or not length is the sole worthy criteria for a collection. I think good story collections have at least some thematic consonance – I’m reading James Joyce’s Dubliners right now, and don’t think THAT doesn’t have some threads tying it all together. The music album is a simple metaphor, because we can sense an album that can bring its individual songs together to feel like a cohesive larger statement that is not just “here are twelve songs we want you to buy”.
Since this would be my first collection, a part of me does appreciate the idea of it being a grab bag. I am still developing my prose fiction voice and these stories reflect that process. I do think that is interesting. But when it comes to tone and setting these stories are so far apart – from very straight-ahead realistic storytelling to quasi-sci-fi stuff. I think reader expectations are an overlooked element of the experience, and that in a collection like this, they carry echoes of the previous story into the next one whether you want it or not. So when anything goes, that’s like saying you want them to re-set their expectations to zero every time around, and I just don’t think that’s realistic.
The in-between solution would be to group the real stuff, the semi-weird stuff, and the really-weird stuff into separate sections within the collection. That tells the reader of the real stuff to stop peering in-between sentences for the goblins or black holes, and the readers of the really-weird stuff to just hang on and trust that I am taking them somewhere interesting through all this strangeness.
I think I like that idea. But my belief is that you can’t sit and ponder that for too long when you can’t even do any of that stuff until you have written more. So, back to that novelette…