Recycling floods of words into multiple venues

Is anyone else feeling jealous at the sight of all the creative stuff our friends are making from unlikely sources during the pandemic? You know who I’m talking about. The ones who craft amazing whatzits from leftover yarn or cook from-scratch restaurant-worthy entrees out of stuff found in the back of their pantries, even post pictures of themselves impersonating famous paintings.

Well, writers, here’s our turn at creative recycling. With crafts like mining our yet-to-be-published novels for short stories – 1,000 words are easier and quicker to sell than 100,000. Or writing fanfic from our own fiction by giving a minor character an expanded role, reimagining a scene from a different point of view, or taking that sea of back story we can’t quite find room for in the big book and giving it a story of its own.

This isn’t a new idea for me, but it got new life recently while I was, as I posted last month, refurbishing some of my previously published short stories for Wattpad. When I dropped some of them in my critique group’s Dropbox, one sharp-eyed critique partner noticed that one employed an episode from a novel the group had recently critiqued.

Why, she asked, would I turn a novel into a short story?

image by Ria Sopala from Pixabay

The short answer was so that I could make a separate sale of the short story, which didn’t exactly replicate the novel chapter it was based on. And has, in fact, been sold twice, while the novel still languishes. I didn’t mention that a second short story (which has also sold twice) was the backstory of another character who ended up in that same novel. Or that still another unsold novel has generated other multi-published short stories.

Still, I had said enough to whet her interest. Where, she, a veteran of long form writing, asked, do you sell short stories?

The answer to that proved too lengthy for a Facebook post, so I’m expanding it here. I’ll also delve into the inspirational benefits to be gleaned from writing short stories that make us want to try our hands at longer works with those characters or settings.

First, let me whet the appetites of you, dear readers, with suggestions for where to sell those story whatzits I see churning in your brains.

When I was writing a lot more short stories than I currently am, my bible for publication venues was Duotrope’s Digest, with its listing of thousands of active markets for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. (It’s since added visual arts venues and literary agents to its mix.) In addition to listing markets and their contact information, Duotrope adds interviews with editors, word counts, numbers of acceptances, approximate response time, and your own personal spreadsheet of submissions.

Is there a downside to all this bounty? Yes, of sorts. Since my initial writing days, Duotrope has added a subscription fee. Still, at $5 per month or $50 for 12 months (each with a beginning free trial) it’s still a good deal. In fact, although I dropped my subscription when I began writing more long form, I’m tempted to return.

However, for those who want to dabble in the publication waters, there are free options. One is The Submission Grinder. I’ve tried it and found it does almost everything Duotrope does, although as yet only for fiction and poetry, without charge.

I’ve also used another not-for-pay source of primarily genre publishing markets, Ralan.com.

Other free sources for short stories as well as longer works include the blog Publishing . . . And Other Forms of Insanity, which also has agent listings; New Pages; and Reedsy.

Still, the possibility of getting money from some of those words we’ve devoted so much time to isn’t the only reason for the mix-and-match use of short stories and novels. There’s also the possibility of faster gratification – publication in weeks instead of years. Plus, short story publications don’t require literary agents as gatekeepers. And most of them don’t require any more in the way of a query letter than the bare facts of the stories title, genre, and word count, and the writer’s own contact information.

And short stories on their own are ways to generate ideas for longer fiction. I’ve hatched the germ of at least a couple of novels, as well as valuable backstory for characters, from short stories written for the market or for writing conferences. Shorter forms are great for trying out ideas. An alt-history short (again, multi-published) turned into a more conventional historical. A fantasy story that flopped at a workshop got new life in a different genre.

And for anyone unsure of which point of view to use, short stories are exercises in possibility. After all, it’s only a few thousand words. . . 

Before proceeding, please note that crafting short stories from already-written or in-progress novels isn’t a simple matter of putting a chapter on a chopping block and cutting a few thousand words. Long form and short form writing are separate works of art. We will find ourselves writing new beginnings or endings, eliding middles, even reimagining our characters.

Think of this as you contemplate your friends’ other crafts on Instagram or Facebook. Maybe they ran out of their favorite yarn and had to improvise. Maybe they had only canned spinach for that quiche instead of fresh or frozen and dared not post the first results to Instagram. Practice, revise, rewrite. Don’t be afraid of any un-Instagram worthy writing results but prepare to turn floods of words into marvelous stories!