After my long run of reviews and ruminations about female masterminds, let’s talk about a new story structure I’ve been trying out last month and will also employ in the future: a story made up of loosely connected short stories.
I first encountered this structure in “A Master of Mysteries” (where the connection was very loose indeed), but found it more compelling in “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings”, where there was raising tension throughout and the stakes were raised between the first and the last chapter (with each chapter being one short story), as the conflict between hero and villainess became more personal and escalated.
After finishing that book, I decided I wanted to try out the structure, but I had not written any short stories in a long time (except for the occasional “The Stories That Weren’t” entry). I had assumed short stories needed to be really short, just a scene or two, and that was not a format I wanted to work with. I was looking at things like flash fiction and realized I’d never write any of that, either.
“A Master of Mysteries” and the following books reminded me that I was wrong there. Most of the original Sherlock Holmes canon is in short stories and they are considerably longer than a scene or two. Anything below 20,000 words is, as it were, technically a short story - novellas begin at 20,000 words.
Yet, I hadn’t really written short stories in years - even most of my fan fiction was meant to be novella-sized and came in more chapters than perhaps it should have. Since I started writing again in a more regular fashion in 2013, I have written novellas and, for the first time in my life, novels.
So while the new story structure intrigued me, I wasn’t sure whether I could work with it. I could see a few projects which might profit from it - and there are some which I haven’t properly plotted so far because I wasn’t sure how to shape them into a set of novellas or into a novel -, but I didn’t want to go all out and work on one of them immediately.
My worry was that, if I failed, I would have to re-plot and rewrite a full project again to put it into a shape in which it could be published. Then I thought ‘fan fiction’ and things changed.
I have been writing fan fiction off and on for a while again and I had just plotted a piece of fan fiction to write for my own entertainment and as a training exercise. I wanted to write a story composed of several short stories. A fan fiction didn’t need to reach my minimum book length of 60,000 words, since I would not publish it as a book, anyway. I could indulge myself, plot a fan fiction of some sort that way, write it, perhaps put it on Archive Of Our Own in time for others to read. I already had what I needed to keep up my publishing schedule until next February, after all.
I wanted to write a story with that structure. I wanted to write something with a female mastermind. Then I thought ‘why only one mastermind?’ and I thought of my unfinished fan fiction inspired by the “Johannes Cabal” stories. I had two female characters based off Johannes and Horst Cabal on my hard drive. I had the possibility to pit one female mastermind (Johanna Cabal who shares a lot of character traits with her grandfather’s brother) against another mastermind (newcomer Madame Ducreux). I could play the ‘two heroes, one villain mastermind’ game, but with an all-female cast.
Johanna and Alisha were there. I would never publish any story with them as my own, anyway. I could work out a story with them. Pushing them back in time first (they should live in a world roughly analogue to modern day, given that the time of Johannes Cabal has aspects of the 1890s to the 1950s), I then began to plot. I went for five stories to make up the full story, starting it off easy with Johanna and Alisha crossing paths with Madame Ducreux and took it from there until in the last story things come to a finale which Madame Ducreux does not survive.
As I was plotting, I realized that this structure would be ideal for a couple of other stories I have on hold - stories I have started plotting or at least prepared for it already, but haven’t been able to finish as a regular set of novellas or a novel. With the short stories, I can tell things in a more poignant matter (for instance with my ‘Dark Universe’ project “Creatures United” where seven novellas might be too extensive). With the short stories, I can get a better shot at my Zorro-inspired story “The Black Bandit”, since I no longer need to have a coherent plot going from the first to the last scene, but can work with six or seven shorter adventures of the bandit throughout which the tension and the danger escalate. Colin Rook might work better in this format, too, and I can see that my fallen angel Raziel might be ideal for it as well. That’s four projects I have lying around which will finally see the light of day and can be published by me, since they are my originals.
Do I now regret that I wrote a story I will not be publishing professionally first? No, not at all. I had fun with “The Lady of the Dead” and there’s Archive Of Our Own to bring it into the world, if I wish to. I’m writing pretty fast by now and can almost finish a book in a month, if I put my mind to it. Even in April, doing a lot of plotting and relatively little writing, I managed to reach my 50,000-word goal. I can afford to write something ‘for fun’ every now and then. I can afford some writing exercises and some fan fiction or erotica if I want to.
There is a lesson to be learned here - which is not to be afraid to try out something new. I never saw myself as a writer of short stories, but now I will definitely add them to my repertoire. There’s also a second lesson for me in this - to do more things for fun. I’ve been very focused on finishing all my plotted stories, especially as I got so close as to have to stop my regular publishing schedule a while ago because I didn’t have the material. I can afford doing something for fun and it makes me more motivated and thus helps me write better stuff for publication, too.
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