LeapYear, you bring up two good questions. [smile]

The time conflict I can tell you my own philosophy on - I think that if you have the inspiration to write something, whether it be a scene or an outline, you should write it; research is for when you are confused or lacking in inspiration.

As to concerns about posting your ideas online, that is a perpetual problem. There is really no such thing as a private forum. If this were a workshop where attendance was limited to only tuition-paying students we could issue passwords to only those people and use a password-protected forum, but even then there's no guarantee they would not mock or steal ideas. Since this is a free forum I have no real names or other data about the students and making a password-protected forum then handing the password out to anyone who asked would be pointless. I do have the ability to delete any blatantly disrespectful posts and ban anyone who insists on being rude, but writers do need to be tough enough to take or ignore criticism of their work.

But there are some factors which balance this out. Most story ideas are not unique enough that it is possible to steal them in any meaningful way. Anyone could come up with a story about Adam the knight slaying the dragon and winning the maiden. Moreover, an idea isn't worth anything all by itself, only actual stories can be sold, and starting from the same idea every person reading this thread would write a unique and different story. This workshop in particular is mainly going to look at outlines and character descriptions which all fall into this category of things that are too generic and vague to be steal-able.

The first Harry Potter book is a fairly good choice for an analysis. Personally I think that its strength is in its worldbuilding and characters, not its plot. It is a quite standard hero-and-sidekicks coming-of-age fantasy as well as belonging to the well-established genre of the school story, and I agree that it is structurally similar to Star Wars. I assume you have read Vogler's _The Writer's Journey_ and Frey's _The Key: How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth_? One problem you will encounter though is that the first volume of such a series is not really complete in itself, you kind of have to analyze the plot of the whole series to understand how to write one.

Well, I would not recommend doing the final volume of the Harry Potter series because the final volume of any series is not standalone; like fanfiction it skips character development and worldbuilding exposition because these have been done in previous material.

The Reality Dysfunction, yeah that's more than 1,100 pages assuming you mean both volumes. And the Nightengale one is listed as the first volume of a 1,400 page quartet. Well I guess my advice is this - do the first volume (or plot arc if there happens to be more or less than 1 per volume) of whichever series is closest to what you want to write, and plan to do the rest of the series later. Do enough to learn how to do it and get some insight into what you want to do now and you should have no problem independently doing more later if you want to. Or another option would be to do the first volume in detail, and a quick vague skeletal outline of the rest.

(BTW one thing I would like to see from you and anyone else looking at writing a series rather than a single novel is some comments on how a series is different from a novel and why the series is more what you want to write.)

If you allow yourself to have doubts about whether it will be worth it in the end, you won't get it written - this is a sad fact I have learned through experience.

On to technical matters - no it is not really accurate to think of a novel as a series of short stories. There are novels which have been made by assembling short stories and writing connecting material - these are called 'patch-ups' or 'patch-up novels'. It actually requires quite a lot of editing to get a series of short stories to look and feel like a novel. Why is this? Well novels have an overall plot arc and dramatic structure (i.e. rising action, climax, etc.)

But also the percentages of content in novels are different from those in short stories. Novels actually have a larger proportion of character development and exposition. It is nice to be writing a later book in the series so that your reader is already familiar with your characters and world, but even then if you don't keep introducing new characters, showing personality changes in old characters, and giving out new details about the world the reader will get bored. The main difference between long-format fiction and short-format fiction is that novels and series have the room to deeply explore characters and a world. And when you have that kind of room you have to use it, otherwise it seems like a big void under the surface of your story.

For a writer who wants to write as much plot and as little other stuff as possible, well, honestly I'd go with a visual formal (screenplay, tv episode script, comic script...), but yes short stories are also worthy of consideration because they don't have room for much character development or exposition and have a higher percentage of plot than novels. (That's exactly why I personally don't write short stories, because I love character development and exposition while I'm only moderately interested in plot.) It's perfectly possible to write many short stories about the same character (Sherlock Holmes is a wonderful example) and these can be published both singly and in collections or a patch-up. Short stories do have the advantage that if you finish and publish one the can help reassure you that writing them is worth it.

But back to the virtues of the series. Publishers are particularly hungry for trilogies or continuing series which have a stand-alone first-volume (so they they can drop the series without angering readers if the first volume doesn't sell well). A series invests more in building up one intellectual property and this may be capitalized on by the creation of related movies, video games, toys, etc. The chance of any of that happening for a given series is a long shot, but it just doesn't happen at all for standalone novels. Might happen with a lot of short stories about the same character though. Other than the commercial side of things, series exist mainly because the writer falls in love with one world, or only has room in their subconscious for one world, and would rather write many plots in this world than come up with a new world. Some writers are the opposite - they have only one basic plot or cast of characters they want to write about, but they explore unique variations by setting it in a different world each time.


At any rate, the point is this: writing short stories will teach you about writing short stories and writing a novel will teach you about writing a novel. There's no point in worrying about how good it is until you have some sort of complete manuscript, at which point you can decide whether to work at editing it with the goal of publishing it, or whether it was a learning experience and you now know enough to write something better. The decision whether to write short stories, novels, or some other format should be made according to which form your tastes and instincts are most suited for, and which suits your goals as a writer; no other factors are particularly relevant. Definitely don't be afraid to write something bad because as long as you are writing something you will be learning and becoming a better writer. But writing fiction is not for people who are worried about wasting their time because you could always make more money working overtime, the possibility of getting rich writing fiction is quite remote.

Aw. [sad] Well, perhaps you'll join one of the later workshops when we get to working on outlines.