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Originally Posted by Barney  As has already been said (by Troo), I don't think ctg was saying that novel = series of short stories. But I reckon that most novels can be broken down to subplots that usually involve the same characters and some common settings.
The subplots should marry together and interlock to form a satisfying, unified narrative we call a novel. They shouldn't always pay off sequentially (as in an anthology), but maybe in clusters, as pacing demands. But there is nothing wrong with initially thinking of those seperate strands as short stories. Not at all. |
Again, I have to take issue with this (at least, if I'm understanding what you're saying here). Unless it is an episodic novel, or a series of shorter tales woven together into a novel (in which case such a disproportion is simply all-but-inevitable), then these subplots need to be seen conceptually as a part of a whole, not as short stories, or a series of interrelated but distinct tales which eventually form a whole; else there is far too much chance of misproportion and imbalance in the novel as a whole. This is something we see even with many excellent writers who attempt such a scheme, and it usually takes them several books to get the proportions right so that the novel works as a whole, rather than a set of more-or-less disparate parts. They may give that impression on first reading, but it should be evident on a more careful reading that the writer saw them as threads contributing to the entire tapestry, much the same as various motifs, tableaux, tropes, bits of foreshadowing, and even choice of phrasing; rather than as in
any way stories in their own right....