To my endless frustration, I’m not a novel type of writer. The medium I seem most suited to these days is the novella, and I play happily in stories around 8-10K words long as well. Writing a novel has been my white whale over the past decade, with dozens of failed attempts to my name.

I have story ideas that I see as novels, but I haven’t found the right process to bring them to life yet. That said, I’m starting to think I’ve hit on a writing process that just might work for completing a novel.

At this point, I’ve accepted that I lean toward discovery writing/pantsing. I’d rather be a planner because I feel like it’s more efficient, but at this point, I’ll do whatever works. The annoying thing is that my process doesn’t end there. At least right now, I can’t simply decide to write a novel, come up with a loose outline, draft, and then redraft until I have a complete manuscript. Nor can I decide to write a novel and pants my way to the end. No, that would be too easy.

Instead, writing short stories and novellas has strongly suggested that I need to follow a different process:

1. Choose an idea: Come up with a gripping idea (or, far more commonly, just choose from the scores I’ve already jotted down).
2. Decide what the story is: Figure out what shape I want the story to take. What genre and tropes/kinks am I leaning into? Whose story is it? What’s the gist of what happens in the beginning, middle, and end?
3. Draft: Once I have a compelling idea with enough heft, write the story draft, not worrying about length.
4. Edit and expand: Do developmental edits, adjusting and refining the story into its “true” shape (which is whatever feels most right/compelling to me). Here, the story often expands, extending plot points, filling in character and setting details, and complicating conflicts. This is how some of my stories grow into novellas. Regardless, all of them do get longer.
5. Final edits and publish: Continue to refine the story through lower-level edits and publish it. Ideally, I’ll get some reader feedback.
6. Plan how to expand to novel-length: And here’s where the potential novel part begins: Many of my stories continue to call to me past this point, asking to be even bigger. So the next step would be taking that published work and expanding it even more. I usually have an intuitive sense of what I want to expand, but it’s always worth exploring further. What aspects of the characters would I like to explore more? Any extra points of view? How would I expand the world and add complications to the main plot? What subplots might I add? Perhaps the novel would continue where the story left off.
7. Outline: I’m not entirely sure what the next step would be from there, but I think I’d outline after that. I’d figure out the shape of the novel like I did with the short story and then create an outline similar to the Save the Cat method.
8. Draft and edit: Much like my shorter stories, I’d write my first draft, let it sit for a while, then edit and edit to expand the draft and fill in the final shape of the novel.
9. Finish a novel: And ta-da! Final manuscript complete.

So here’s the question: why not just start at Step 6?

Well, because I’ve tried dozens of times and it just doesn’t work for me. It’s like I have to feel my way around a story and its characters to figure out what shape it should ultimately take. And right now, at least, I can only seem to do that by writing a smaller complete story first. Without that stable core, my mind iterates in a million different directions and I get overwhelmed by seemingly endless equally compelling possibilities.

At the same time, massive gaps form in the novel manuscript that I never seem able to fill (especially in the middle) because I just don’t know who the characters are yet, what this world is like, or even what the story’s ultimately about.

In short, starting with a short story or novella gives me a concrete anchor point. I know these characters. I know what happens to them. I know several little details beyond that.