rumjhumA writer friend of mine who is pretty good at writing flash fiction and had also won a major flash fiction prize is full of woe lately because the novel she is working on is not happening, according to her. I think she is being too hard on herself. While it is true that a novel is an entirely different ball game from a flash fiction, why should the writing process be a deterrent?

Most novels have a structure similar to a short story, where there’s an initial, inciting incident; a series of conflicts in which the main character is frustrated in his/her attempts to achieve his/her goal; a climax, in which the main conflicts are resolved and a denouement or falling action. There can also be multiple story lines to make the original plot more complex. Many novels are not structured in the classic sense at all, but are made up instead of small narrative pieces which may or may not be about the same characters or have a standard fictional structure, yet all of which add up to a complex picture of a character/set of characters, a place or a time; even perhaps all three. This is also a perfectly plausible way to go about constructing a good novel.

The key words here are “smaller narrative pieces”, which can be as small as four to five hundred words at a time. These are the flash fiction pieces that can be roped together like a string of pearls to ultimately produce that novel. The trick is to keep writing those small pieces without worrying about not writing enough and whether the novel is coming through or not. No novel looks like the finished product during the first draft stage, and sometimes at the second and third draft stages as well. The smarter trick is to enjoy (as in being involved with your writing and actually will yourself to do it if it doesn’t come easy), writing those little chunks of fiction. If you haven’t enjoyed/been involved with your novel how can you expect your readers to enjoy reading it? As for the little chunks of fiction, they could be different situations faced by the main character/characters, cameo pieces of the secondary characters, even whimsical episodic pieces.

So long as all of them basically adhere to the plot in your head or the core direction of your novel and are rooted in the same soil I see no reason for the novel to not to happen. There are artistic rules and success stories to prove those rules right. Then again, so many writers have broken the rules and set new standards, paved new paths. But all of them have kept writing and kept on writing, sometimes only a few short sentences in a day.