The Leap by Eric Beetner

 If you have typically written short stories and then wrote longer (novels or novellas), what was the transition like for you, and how did you teach yourself to take the leap and go long? 

I wrote short stories for a while before I tackled a novel, sure. My big transition, however, was going from screenplays to novels.

A feature-length script is structurally similar enough to a novel that it didn’t feel like stretching out a story beyond its limits. Screenplays are much more skeletal, more efficient and are a desert of specific details, though. My biggest fear was that I’d never be able to fill in all that missing stuff that becomes the job of the director, the costumer, the set designer and the actors.

I needn’t have worried. When you write a movie you play that film in your head the entire time. You trust that the other collaborators will see the same set as you, hear the same sounds, and get the same nuance, but it's all there for you in your mind. Now comes the job of putting it down on paper. In many ways, it's freeing to not have to rely on someone else's interpretation of what they think you meant. For those several hundred pages, you are the director, the cinematographer, the editor and all the way down the line.

Story structure is key no matter what the final medium. You can write a novel, a script or a 10-part podcast and you’ll still be following same rules and instincts for your overall story. Learning about story as I did mostly from the movies, I paid close attention to where certain beats landed, how long a story could sustain moments of tension and suspense, how long to linger after a resolution (hint: not long).

Short stories are often a quick slice of a larger story. It follows a mantra I use daily in my film editing work which is to get into a scene as late as possible and get out as early as you can. When you have the luxury of the word count to do a set up, backstory, scene setting, etc. then go for it, but also do it in moderation. The biggest lesson I get from screenwriting and from shorts is that so much of that stuff isn’t necessary in the end. If it is missing, we’ll be fine without it. The reader can do a lot of the work on their own and it makes for more active engagement with a story.

I bristle against anyone who thinks they need 1000 pages to tell a fully developed story. Anyone who has a favorite movie knows that a complete story with all the info you need about characters, setting, motivation and resolution can be done in 90 minutes. In a word count, that script would probably fall somewhere in the 20-30K word range, that’s it. But the story can be fully satisfying in that short amount of time.

When I started writing novels and I realized I could fill in those details while still keeping things moving along, my confidence soared. My first novel is still in a drawer somewhere never to be seen by human eyes, but still…

Approaching the story from that same place of giving a fully-realized tale doesn’t change based on the format of your final product. Even in a short story. If you know what you’re driving toward in a short, then you know when you’ve gotten there. Many of the most powerful short tales end on that moment of impact (think Rod Serling) The twist or revelation that may drive a novel into a second act, should be the conclusion to a short story. It’s okay to want to know what happens next. 

Moving from a short to a novel is often no more than following that desire to the next step and seeing where it leads. It’s why so many novels begin as short stories that spin out into something larger.

So for me, it wasn’t so much a leap as just continuing to walk forward and trace that story where it wanted to go.