Hello, dreamers. As many of you are aware, I’ve spent most of the past month editing a series of novellas. This has been new to me, as to this point I’ve only written flash fiction, short stories, and novels.

Now, that’s not to say I’ve never written a novella (or novelette) before. Rather, I’ve never written a novella intentionally. I always like to say that a story should be as long or short as it needs to be. And that sounds great when you’re writing. But every once in a while, you sit down to write a story, and suddenly realize there’s a lot more story there than you realized. You get into a rhythm, let the flow take you where it may. And suddenly you’re looking at an unmarketably long short story, or an unmarketably short novella, depending on how you look at it.

This happens to me somewhat regularly. I finish a story, check the word count, and realize I had a lot more to say than I’d expected. That typically leads to a three-step process:

Step One: “This might be too long. But I can fix this. Just need to remove a little superfluous text.”

Step Two: “Oh shit. It’s still way too long!”

Step Three: furious ax-swinging to boil the story down to proper length.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but all of the stories in my upcoming Turn of the Century series were originally intended to be short stories. And all of them ended up being significantly longer than they were meant to be. In the aftermath of my writing them late last year, there was in fact a flurry of ax-swinging. I cut a hell of a lot out of all of these stories. Much of that was worldbuilding, which was unnecessary if I planned to shop them around for publication in literary magazines. I’ll admit it was hard to cut out so much of my rich, fictional universe. But needs want when the cause demands.

Then, early this year, I decided to pivot: rather than releasing the stories as a collection, as I’d planned by the end of last year, I decided to release them first as a series of novellas.

My writing process almost inevitably goes long-to-short, as I put it. When writing a first draft, I get into a groove, and let the story tell itself. While writing a novel, I’ll make minor revisions between chapters, but this seldom leads to major changes. Then, once the dust settles, I take a few days to a few weeks off, let the story get out of my head. After that, I put my editing cap on. I invariably end up removing significant amounts of text, mostly excess exposition or adjectives. In the end, I manage to boil the story down to what it needs to be: a tight, impactful piece of fiction.

And then I got to Turn of the Century. This time, I’ve found myself in the odd position of having to basically undo my initial editing. In at least a few cases, I was lucky enough to have retained my original, pre-editing documents. So all I had to do was revise the cut content, and return it to the file. But as I got into the swing of things, I began to pivot. I started enriching the story, adding crucial worldbuilding I’d intentionally left out when writing. Because now, it was essential.

The results have been deeply rewarding. MERIT 19 became a deeper story about the lives of humans born in space, and the problems inherent in expanding the corps of astronauts to include those unwilling to take serious risks. Endurance went from being a maudlin love story to a deeply-introspective examination of the realities of long-duration space travel. I found myself finally telling the stories I wanted to tell in the first place.

I still have a great deal of editing to do, but I’m proud of what I’ve done so far. Of course, now that I’ve written new text, the next step is to edit said new text. And lord knows how that will turn out. But suffice to say, I think I’m getting the hang of this whole novella thing. And I don’t think I’m done writing in-between pieces. Until next time, as always, dare to dream. – MK