How Writing a Short Story Can Improve a Novel-in-Progress
Writing short stories can help establish your credentials as a fiction writer. It will give you much-needed exposure to editors, literary agents, and readers. Some publications will even pay you for it. You know what else a short story can do for you? It can serve as a vehicle for experimentation when you’re writing a novel.
(How to Choose Your Novel’s Title.)
Multo, my first attempt at fiction and third published novel, is the product of such an experimentation. Multo (meaning ghost in Tagalog) follows a Filipino American bounty hunter named Domingo as he looks for the only quarry that has ever eluded him, a biracial Filipina who can disappear like a ghost.
I initially wrote the story from the point of view of Monica, the Filipina who overstays in the U.S. in pursuit of her American Dream—her American father who doesn’t know she exists.
The father happens to be an Air Force general bent on avoiding a political scandal. He hires Domingo to nab Monica and take her to immigration authorities for deportation. It’s the ultimate rejection for Monica.
The literary agents who read my manuscript deemed it “uncommercial.” They all said literary fiction was a tough sell, plus my book’s immigration theme and Filipino protagonist made it completely unsellable.
A Short Story Saves the Day
In the face of such failure, I moved on. I wrote four other novels, two of which were traditionally published without the benefit of literary representation. And yet I kept returning to my first manuscript. You see, I wrote it when I was a green-card holder awaiting U.S. citizenship. The subject of immigration is close to my heart. It’s also a political issue that never goes away as immigration reform continues to elude Congress.
I wanted to salvage the story. What if I tell it from Domingo’s point of view? He’s a secondary character, an observer. Many novels feature narrators who are not the main protagonists. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a great example. We see Jay Gatsby from the eyes of Nick Carraway, the cousin of Daisy Buchanan.
Changing my novel’s narrator meant a complete overhaul, a gamble. I refused to roll the dice by writing another full-fledged manuscript of the same story. But I could experiment with a short story. The result was Domingo the Bounty Hunter, a 12-page (3,500 words), first-person account of his first meeting with Monica. The Snake Nation Review published it in 2004. My experiment was successful.
Check out Cindy Fazzi’s Multo here:
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Even if my short story had not been accepted, I would have proceeded with the revision. The writing process itself had shown me the path to a better POV. Publication was a bonus.
Apart from finding the right narrator, here’s how writing the short story helped my novel-in-progress:
Finding the Right Genre: When I chose Domingo’s POV, the novel’s structure, tone, and pacing changed organically. Domingo is a wiseass and kickass bounty hunter who, like Monica, believes in the American Dream. Unlike her, he’s a naturalized U.S. citizen. The nature of his job makes them de facto enemies. My revamped novel pits a dogged bounty hunter against a desperate woman in hiding. My book became a thriller. It got me a literary agent—Maria Napolitano of Jane Rotrosen Agency, who suggested the title Multo.Injecting Levity: Telling the story from Monica’s perspective was heavy-handed. Her biggest crime is not her lack of proper legal status but her desire to be accepted by her father and to belong in America. It’s a sob story that can’t stand on its own feet. However, Domingo sees immigration from a different lens because he’s not a victim of circumstances like Monica. His irreverent critique of the immigration system through an advice book he’s writing for undocumented immigrants turns out funny.Choosing Third-Person POV: Writing a short story in first person worked well, but it also showed me how restrictive the POV was. While the short story describes one encounter between the two main characters that takes place within an hour, the novel spans almost two decades. Multo has past and present timelines. The present shows Domingo looking for Monica for the third time, while the past recalls the two other times he found her, only to let her go for one reason and another. A third-person POV worked better in alternating between the two timelines.
The Power of POV
My experimentation aside, millions of Thomas Harris fans know how important the right POV is. Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, which single handedly elevated the serial-killer genre when it was released in 1988, was told from the perspective of Clarice Starling, a young FBI agent. She goes toe to toe with Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist with a taste for human liver, fava beans, and a nice chianti. Fans loved Clarice, portrayed by Jodie Foster in the Oscar Award-winning film adaptation. From her perch, there’s hope even in the presence of evil.
More than a decade later, Harris wrote the sequel, Hannibal, from the POV of the titular villain. The result? A bloodier and infinitely more brutal and cynical story. By choosing Lecter’s POV, readers see only the bleakest, goriest parts of the world he inhabits.
Whether it’s choosing the right narrator or something else, it’s better to work out any issues in 12-20 pages than 300 pages. Try writing a short story first before going for broke.