Bigger is better?
We’ve been pretty stingy with words over the last few months. This month, we’re feeling a little more generous! Like, so generous! And it’s not just because our sample story originally came in at 2,700 words, at least 2,100 of which are “darlings.” Okay, maybe it is. But we were thinking: what if you had room to tell the story you originally planned to tell, before the 1,000 word guillotine fell on it? That’s what we’re going to find out this month. We’ve been cramming you into tighter and tighter spaces, taking away words, changing the rules until you barely had a Hemingway of a story left. Now we’re giving it all back… doubled.
Ready?
June’s assignment is: write your story in 2,000 words. (Maximum wordcount for your submission: 2,000 words)
The whys and hows:
We’ve all seen a call for submissions that almost but not quite matches a story we’ve already got written and waiting for a home. And if you’re like us, the problem with your story is it’s just too short. But how do you make your 1,000 word story that you wrote for that sweet fiction prompt on our grids fit into a 3,000 word call without getting boring or wordy?
You have two options for stretching your story: Add more words (to the story you have) or add more story.
Adding more words
Here’s your chance to play with language, augment descriptions, reinforce connections, and elaborate on aspects of your story that you only had space to hint at in 1,000 words. Did your beta readers get confused? Add clarification. Was there a gorgeous scene you had to cut? Put it back in. The trick here is not to forget what you’ve learned over the last few months. Do you really need that adjective? Does that new description or conversation help move the story forward? Be as thoughtful with the second thousand words as you were with the first thousand. Use the extra space to fill in what’s missing, not to add padding.
Adding more story
Introducing a new plotline can be a great way to fill out your story. Maybe your story as-is isn’t quite finished; maybe there’s another scene that raises the stakes or more satisfactorily wraps up loose ends. You could add backstory to the beginning, an epilogue to the end, or even insert a character-building scene that used to take place “offscreen” into the middle. Just be careful not to go too far—bringing in a new character could increase the tension, for example, but adding an entire subplot might just bog your story down if there isn’t room to fully develop it.
But wait, there’s more more!
We lied: there’s a third approach. You can do a little of both! (That’s what we did with our example story.) You’ve got an extra 1,000 words or so to play with. Make them count.
A few tips and tricks we learned on the way:
- Make sure your additions match the voice and tone of your original writing (or vice versa). You don’t want the new writing to stand out from the old.
- That goes double if you’re inserting original scenes back into work that you’ve been editing for four months. Your voice has changed. Your adjectives have been cleaned up, your prose tightened, your dangling participles, er, undangled. Make sure you’ve got a seamless fit.
- Be wary of waxing purple. That is, just because you can add words doesn’t mean you have to. An apple can be an apple. Or it can be a green apple. Or a tart apple. But a tart, green sliver of juiciness full of crisp flavor? Might be going a little over the top, even if you’re allowed enough words.
- As we said last month, remember the list you made for yourself (mentally or on paper) of what the most important things in your story are. Those should still be there. This is your chance to build on them or make sure your readers have enough information to understand them.
Need a second pair of eyes to see what you might have missed? Don’t be afraid to ask for help in the Coffeehouse!
Good luck! Talk to you soon…
Loading InLinkz ...Hindsight!
In case you missed it, here's a look back (see what we did there?) at the exercises in our 2020 workshop.
January: Write a story or essay in 1,000 words
February: Write the same piece in 100 words
March: Retain just 25 adjectives and adverbs from your original 1,000 word story
April: Write your story or essay using only dialogue
May: Write your story or essay from a different point of view
June: Write your story or essay in 2,000 words
July: Write your story or essay out of chronological order
August: Record your story or essay and transcribe it
September: Write your story or essay using a different voice
October: Write a poem using your story or essay as inspiration
November: Write a version of your story set in an alternate universe.
December: Write the final version of your story or essay in 1000 words.
About the author:
Christine Hanolsy is a (primarily) science fiction and fantasy writer who simply cannot resist a love story. She joined the YeahWrite team in 2014 as the microstory editor and stepped into the role of Editor-In-Chief in 2020. Christine was a 2015 BlogHer Voices of the Year award recipient and Community Keynote speaker for her YeahWrite essay, “Rights and Privileges.” Her short fiction has been published in a number of anthologies and periodicals and her creative nonfiction at Dead Housekeeping and in the Timberline Review. Outside of YeahWrite, Christine’s past roles have included Russian language scholar, composer, interpreter, and general cat herder. Find her online at christinehanolsy.com.
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
