About a week ago I finished a first draft of Novella 2 Chaos Boogaloo. I started writing it in early November last year, shelved it when developmental edits for We Are All Ghosts In The Forest arrived and finally got back to it at the start of April.
I’m not gonna lie - it’s a bit of a mess. It needs some serious edits and I’ve already got lots of ideas percolating for how to make it better. This is slightly embarrassing to admit but some of those ideas came when I looked at its original pitch (written for my agent about a year ago) & realised I’d entirely forgotten a couple of very cool plot points. Oops.
Anyway, while it percolates, I thought I’d talk about it with you lovely creatures because the concept of this novella is my most challenging story structure yet and it got me thinking about growth as a writer, bravery, and giving yourself space for failure.
This story, without giving too much away, takes place in a small houseboat found-family in a climate dystopian/solarpunk future (yes they can co-exist, so there) and is narrated by one central character over the course of a single day. During this day, six other characters take over the narration in turn to tell the others the story of how they came to be there. Conversations between the found family continue throughout and the central narrator picks up their narration within and between each internal story. So in the space of about 25,000 words I have seven PoV voices in a nested, cyclic but fairly fluid story structure.
To add to that, the central narrator is unreliable, and each of the other narrators’ voices represent a step in a thematic process (spoilerrrrrs), three of the narrators tell fairytales within their own stories (nested(nested)), one of them tells their story backwards, and all of them contain tiny links to each other.
Why did I think this was a good idea??
One of the things I love about short stories is how they let you experiment with different styles, voices and structures - you can get away with things in 3,000 words that you couldn’t maintain over 100,000. And if that 3,000 experiment is a disaster, pfft. It only took a day or two. It’s not like you spent 9 months writing it only to realise it was going nowhere.
Novellas aren’t quite so forgiving, but they do still give you more wiggle room than a novel, and the structural skills are more transferable from novella to novel than from short story to … anything tbh. When I was writing my first novella - The Last To Drown - I realised this length of story might be a really empowering medium in which to stretch my novel-writing wings. To date I have been fairly structurally unexperimental in my novels. They all, dual timelines and other shenanigans aside, follow some recognisable version of conflict-centered modern plot structures. My main focus in shaping each of my novel plots has actually been the Transformational Arc as per Dara Marks - the internal psychological thematic change my characters undergo, rather than a 3-Act Structure but the end result isn’t dissimiliar.
In The Last To Drown though, I played with the kishōtenketsu (4 Act) structure instead, which hinges on discovery and revelation rather than conflict. I did it primarily as it felt absolutely right as a framework to weave that particular fugue-like voice around, but I also did it because I wanted to know if I could.
It worked, I think. So in a rush of enthusiasm, I went, hey why not up the ante and launch myself headfirst at a bananas complicated Novella 2? Brilliant plan.
And then I got scared.
What if I couldn’t pull it off, what if it was an unholy and unconvincing mess? In between April when I first wrote the pitch, and November when I sat down to draft it, I convinced myself it was too much of a challenge and would be a disaster. But I still really wanted to try. I don’t want to stagnate as a writer - I think it’s easy, once published, to feel like you’ve cracked it. You know how to write publishable books, you can replicate whatever you did last time again - jobsagoodun. And perhaps that’s fine if you’re writing books to a very tight genre or series structure where you can’t deviate too much without losing readers. But outside of that narrow space, I think replicating iterations of the same thing is going to get quickly boring, for both you and your reader. I want to feel like I am growing, learning new things, treading new ground with each book I write - even if not better (whatever that means), I’d like to be doing something different, you know?
So I tricked myself into leaping into Novella 2 by telling myself this was an experiment. That it was just a light, curiosity-driven side-project to play with in between the various book edits - no pressure, no expectation, and definitely no consequences for failure.
Thus hoodwinked I wrote most of it in November. Then, predictably, had to do the whole trickery spiel again to get myself back into it this month. Working in my favour this time were the facts that a) I was so sick of editing, drafting anything looked appealing, b) I’d had a blast drafting it in November, and c) I took the pressure off entirely this month - spending a lot of time away from the keyboard, so coming to it felt like a change and a treat rather than a job.
I don’t know if it’ll end up as something publishable, I’m still holding onto that ‘no expectation’ card pretty tightly at this stage. But I have got a messy first draft of the most quietly odd & ambitious story I’ve ever attempted. Which is something to be proud of, I think. There’s a lot of beauty in this story, some plot and voice elements I’m pretty excited by if I’m honest, and I do think (tentatively) that it works.
If it turns out to be destined for the shelf though, that’s okay. I’ve still learned heaps from this process, I’ve bolstered my belief in my own abilities and stretched my storytelling ambitions a little too. I think about that graph you see around on artistic progression - how ability and awareness grow out of step and you have to carry yourself through periods of doubt, trusting that they are leading you to new heights.
I’ve a couple of projects planned which contain fairly ambitious structural elements - one a PoV that is a collective voice of a group of children, told in the first person plural, another that uses different media (scientific reports, letters, diaries, datalogs etc) to tell the story of an unreliable narrator. Writing Novella 2 has shown me I can push myself into new territory and not fall on my face. That knowledge will make me braver going into these future projects than I would have been otherwise, so even if Novella 2 fails, it will have been far from a wasted venture.
It’s hard to carve out time for experiments and failure though, isn’t it? Once you’re on the publication treadmill, there are always deadlines and next books, and next-next books to be working on. And honestly, even writing within the expectations of your editor/agent, there’s still a risk your next book will be deemed unacceptable. So working on something which is well outside the wheelhouse and stands a high chance of being shelved is potentially a) threatening your income, b) slowing your career progression and c) adding friction to your agent/editor relationship.
I guess that’s another advantage to playing this game with novellas - they take perhaps 1/4 to 1/3 of the time it takes to write a novel, so it’s possible to write one in the gaps. Like I did with this - a window waiting for developmental edits to land, and then another window carved out between edits to give my brain and spoons vital recovery time.
May and June are set aside to work on The Salt Oracle edits ready to send to my editor at the end of June, and then I’ll start drafting one of the two above projects over the summer. So I’m not sure when I’ll get to edit Novella 2, but its very structure - of several almost self-contained short stories - means it might be something I can dip in and out of when drafting is on hold for holidays/health/etc. I’m already thinking about what Novella 3 might look like though - where it might push me, carry me, raise me up to. I’m thinking about what I’m afraid to write and what I can do to write it anyway.
Thank you for reading, and for bearing with the many splendid graphs! I’d love to know what has intimidated you in your writing, and what you’re most proud of pulling off. Next time, a Diary update for paid subscribers, and (depending on which one I finish first) either a post about starting out running workshops, or some musings and dissections of book awards. Happy weekend!
A wonderful piece on process. I hadn't come across kishōtenketsu before, and I DO love graphs!