Q & A 197

As I'm revising the rough draft of my novel, I see that I need practice in narrative structure. I am thinking of practicing structure by writing some short stories. Rather than come up with a bunch of new ideas, I was going to rework scenes from the novel into short stories.

If I wanted to submit any of these stories to magazines, would it be a problem if I eventually complete the novel and submit it for publication? Do I need to alter the stories enough to separate them from the novel? I thought it happened sometimes that characters or ideas first appear in short story format but I don't know if that's a bygone practice or part of a marketing scheme, or what. 

If you're Stephen King, and you wrote the novel first, and it's going to be published, then this is a marketing ploy. (Though marketing ploys are usually sample chapters or novel excerpts rather than short stories.) If you are Stephen King and you wrote the short story first, then this is your way of getting another novel published without having to come up with an original idea. All you have to do is surround the short story with 70,000 words of filler (description of stuff, scenes that don't further the plot, etc.).

However, you are not Stephen King (at least I assume you aren't, though it occurs to me that Stephen King would use an alias when writing to Evil Editor for advice), and you would be thrilled to have a short story published in a magazine. Anyone can self-publish their novel, but only a few can get a short story in The New Yorker. You would buy lots of copies of the magazine. It would give you something relevant to add to your bio when trying to attract an agent. So go for it. Odds are that by the time the novel gets published, the magazine will have gone out of business anyway.