How to Write a Novel from a Short Story Part I | Ginger Moran ...

It will perhaps be a surprise to some that novelists suffer anxiety?specifically the anxiety of writing a novel.

I can?t speak for all novelists, but there is enough blood out there?along with complaints, agonizing, hand-wringing and bemoaning?to make me think I?m not alone in being anxious about writing a novel. Even though I have written three of them.

I now worry about what I?m going to write next, so I have two of them lined up in my head. But that isn?t where I started. Where I started was in worrying that I would be able to write any at all.

I was in the creative writing program at the University of Houston and had written quite a few short stories by then. I?d been in the creative writing program at the University of Virginia before that and wrote a few other short stories, mostly in classes taught by Ann Beattie and John Casey, both of whom are wonderful, tough teachers. At UH I?d worked with Rosellen Brown and Phillip Lopate and several guest teachers, all of whom were wonderful and tough but no one as scarily tough as Don Barthelme, who was a genius teacher and administrator as well as a genius writer. But I digress.

I once gave EL Doctorow a ride from the airport in Houston. There is another whole story there, one that doesn?t end particularly well though it starts with my adulation of Doctorow and particularly his brilliant Book of Daniel. I will tell that one when I know you better and am feeling better about embarrassing myself.

For now I?ll just talk about his provocative claim on that car ride that he could tell whether one of his students was a novelist or short story writer by his or her sentence structure. I was too star-struck to inquire much further at the time, but I?ve thought about that idea quite a lot since then and believe that he meant that a short story writer writes tight, intense sentences, like Hemingway. Who could also string them together into a novel, but, still, is beyond brilliant as a short story writer.

My sentences are beyond Faulknerian. Beyond Byzantine. I can give Virgina Woolf a run for her money. I love a great, long, piled up sentence and I adore a real profusion of metaphors. I also love to read novels, finding in their length, their complexity, their leisurely unfolding a comfort, a solace, a haven into which I have sailed ever since I learned how to read. Well, I didn?t read novels at four years old, but you get the idea.

I admire a great short story, but I also find them requiring a bit too much of my attention. And I find them, well, short. Just when I was really sliding into the rhythm of it, it?s done.

So when I was faced with writing a dissertation in fiction at UH I knew I could put together a short story collection?or I could launch out on the journey of the novel. I was never going to be in school again, never be able to write under someone?s direction like that again?when would I ever be able to write a novel, if not then.

So I took a short story?The Algebra of Snow?and turned it into a novel.

The short story can be found here:

http://bit.ly/AlgebraShortStory

The novel can be found here:

http://bit.ly/TheAlgebraOfSnow

ben breedlove kid cudi ben breedlove matt barnes hcm loretta lynn gene kelly zoe saldana