In part 1 and part 2 of a miniseries on turning a short story into a novel, I briefly discussed story arc, characters, setting, and the end game. Here I will show a bit more detail using my initial story and the series that resulted as an example. A few things got turned on their heads along the way.
Danger, Will Robinson! Spoilers Ahead!
If you are reading (or hope to read) The Dragon Lord Chronicles but have not finished, you will find major spoilers here. This is necessary to explain the concepts involved. If that's a problem, I recommend finishing the series before reading this.
As the short story opens, we meet Gerald (the MC) and Sally (future family). During their encounter we learn Gerald believes his parents to have been eaten by dragons. Sally's parents decide to adopt Gerald, but eventually these parents also disappear due to dragons. Gerald sets out to become the greatest dragon lord and kill all dragons.
Since I recalled nothing else but the ending (which takes place several years later), I planned two transition paragraphs to cover that time and get the reader to the climax.
Ending one: At that point, Gerald has become a dragon lord of great renown, returning home to a fortress of a home in a seaside cliff that was built at impossible speed during an uncanny three-day fog. Gerald hosts a dinner for the true mastermind behind the dragon attacks on both sets of parents. Cuthbert (the dragon lore master) has advised Gerald on the mastermind's role. Once the mastermind has been tricked into admitting his guilt, he flees outside, claiming that Gerald cannot attack him under the laws of hospitality. But the man owed Gerald so great a debt through his treachery and villainy that Gerald was not bound by such law. There's more to it, but this is the minimal necessary data.
To become a novel (nevermind a series), the middle must of course be told. In my case, the middle was a blank canvas stretching across time, with minimal physical boundaries. There must be continuity at both ends, of course, but otherwise I had a lot of latitude. If anything I was too conservative with how dragons would have impacted history, but I chose to keep the timeline reasonably similar to ours. I could have easily chosen to vary things widely, or to change things only after a key event. fun fact that developed in the middle; interactions between dragons, and between dragons and humans, are governed by natural laws that incur formal debts that are supernaturally enforced.
The original short story was never published. The first chapter of book one is verbatim from the short story, though initially it was two shorter chapters. The two transition paragraphs became most of what are now four books. The ending (the longest part of the short story) became the (several chapter long) climax near the end of book four. And that changed the most.
Ending two: First, Gerald's character has changed. When he left his new home, he was set on vengeance, and he longed to see justice dealt at his hand. By the end of book four, he sees things very differently. He recognizes that this unrepentant monster must die, if only to prevent him from killing more people. But because the mastermind's larger crimes were against dragons, Cuthbert wields the sword that takes his life. Furthermore, I forgot while writing the bulk of the series that Gerald should live near the sea, so I had to come up with another location for his fortress home, and another explanation (I understood the original mysteries and planned to explain them at the book's end).
Version three: During rewrites I realized anew how great the mastermind's crimes against the dragons were. Using Cuthbert to solve the problem began to seem contrived. Eventually I realized that some of the dragons (and someone else) were owed so much by the mastermind that under the laws of debt, he owed them his life. So the most aggrieved dragons ended up solving the problem. The mastermind had developed a small ecosystem around him, so the end of the climax chapters had to cover that as well. I added a chapter before the climax chapters to explain Gerald's new home. That chapter let me both explain some things that were unclear to the reader, and tie up a loose end I had not foreseen.
The dream, the short story, and the initial draft of book four ended right there. But there were other loose ends that needed to be tied up. It took several tries ranging from one short chapter to two very short chapters to two eight-page chapters to deal with them. This could easily have been longer, but I wanted to cover only what was truly necessary. I'm a firm believer in leaving some things for the reader to decide for herself.
And there you have it, an overview of how I applied these techniques to stretch a short story not just into a book, but into a series. (The joys and perils of pantsing!) I'd love to hear from others who have done this (or even tried to). Please feel free to comment with thoughts and questions!
Copyright 2019, Miles O'Neal, Round Rock, TX.
Photo credit: Desiree Rose, Elkk Photography