In Today’s Journal
* My Quote of the Day
* Two Great Questions
* A Really Good Western
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
My Quote of the Day
“That woman passes out ultimatums like mints at a halitosis convention.” Sam Granger in Blackwell Ops 51
Two Great Questions
My friend Christopher Ridge sent me two great questions via email.
“Have you ever started a story and as you’re writing it you realize ‘I hate this? I hate this so bad!’
“I’ve finished every story I started this year and I don’t want to lose this one because of my feelings toward it. When I finish it, at least it’ll be a completed story/novella.
“Every time I go through something like that and finish it, I sit back and say, ‘Wow, I’m glad I didn’t toss that after all.’
“Part of this is, I’m trying to learn to write longer stuff but it just doesn’t seem to go that way for me. [I know] what we write should come out of our creative mind anyway without much thought and just have fun. Which I do very well. I’m baffled as to why I have a hard time writing longer stuff though.”
My initial response was
“Yes sir, it happens to me more often than you might think. But I just keep writing, remember to let the story be what it is regardless of how I feel about it.
“And I’ve found out after the fact that some readers LOVED what I thought was a sucky story. Go figure.
“That’s probably why Robert Heinlein included ‘You must finish’ as his second rule. Good on you for hanging in there.”
But let’s go a little deeper on the second question.
The key to “writing longer stuff” is the same as the key to finishing what you write: Remember to just write and let the story be what it is. That goes for length as well as content.
I’ll go back to my old example of the 22-volume Wes Crowley saga (over a million words). All of that started with a 6,000 word short story titled “Adobe Walls.”
A Texas Ranger named Wes Crowley stopped in for a whiskey in Adobe Walls, Arizona (the fictional name I gave the actual town of Charleston, about 8 miles west of Tombstone) while he was tracking another Texas Ranger who’d gone ‘bad.’ An incident happened in the saloon, and I wrote it down. That was the beginning.
A few months later, Wes asked whether I’d like to see what led him to be in Adobe Walls in the first place. I said, “Sure” and wrote what ended up being my first novel: Leaving Amarillo.
I didn’t know it was going to be a novel. As far as I knew, Leaving Amarillo would only be another short story featuring Wes Crowley.
But the story kept running, and it dragged me along with it.
I was still learning to trust writing into the dark. I basically held my breath and kept writing down what happened and how Wes et al reacted in dialogue and action.
When the story finally ended with 40,598 words, it was a novel. But it also led me to continue the story in a sequel—Longing for Mexico—which led me to continue into another sequel, South to Mexico.
When the dust cleared, I felt great and accomplished, having written a trilogy. And I thought the story was over.
But soon I found the story WASN’T over. I wrote three prequels to Leaving Amarillo (and the trilogy), then eleven more novels to fill a 16-year gap that occurred between the second and third prequel. Then I wrote six more novels, all sequels to South to Mexico, and the story finally ended.
Of course, all of that happened over a period of years and while I was writing other stories (long and short) in other genres.
But being blessed to ride a wild horse in a just cause with Wes and his fellow Rangers has been the most rewarding experience of my time as a fiction writer.
Here’s the point:
If I had ‘decided’ in advance that “Adobe Walls” ‘should be’ a novella or novel, it still would have ended as a short story and I might have been dissuaded from continuing as a fiction writer.
And if I had ‘decided’ in advance that Leaving Amarillo should be ‘only’ a short story, the same thing would have happened.
So the lesson here is to have no preconceived notions regarding either content OR length. Always allow a story to unfold naturally. That’s both the easiest and best way to handle it. Letting a story unfold naturally ALWAYS results in an authentic story.
There’s only one difference between a short story and a novella or novel anyway: The story that, when it ends, is about One Event is a short story. The story that keeps running and, when it ends, is about MORE than one event is a novella or novel.
But that’s fine, isn’t it? You aren’t a ‘short story writer’ or a ‘novel writer’ anyway. You don’t have to choose, so why limit yourself? You’re a fiction writer, period.
Your only job is to record the current story as it unfolds, whatever happens and however many words and hours it takes.
So just run with it. You will be richly rewarded.
I also recommend visiting Christopher’s Substack here.
A Really Good Western
There’s a really good period western, The Rise of a Warrior, unfolding over on Your Morning Serial. Here are links to the first four episodes:
Stop by and check it out. You might find out you enjoy westerns.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
3 Days Left On Half Price Sale!
Going For It! I put the idea of a novel every two weeks into Dean’s head, so I left this comment:
Good luck, Dean. Pulling for you. I wrote and published 21 novels in 42 weeks before I broke my streak. Back at it again now. (And if I count novels and other major books released at least once a month, the number jumps to 41 in 94 weeks. So a book every 2.29 weeks.)
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 1020
Mentorship Words…………….. 400
Total Nonfiction…………………. 1420
Writing of Blackwell Ops 51: Sam Granger | The Road Back
Day 1…… 2807 words. To date………… 2807
Day 2…… 2489 words. To date………… 5296
Day 3…… 3111 words. To date………… 8407
Day 4…… 2430 words. To date………… 10837
Day 5…… 3274 words. To date………… 14111
Fiction for November……………………… 31172
Fiction for 2025…………………………… 693213
Nonfiction for November.………………… 10370
Nonfiction for 2025………………..……… 249840
2025 consumable words………………… 935484
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 17
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 36
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 121
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29