Storytelling: How to Write Interconnected Short Stories: Theory and Workshop

1. Introduction: Welcome to story writing, How to write interconnected short stories, Theory and Workshop. Today, we're going to talk about interconnected short stories such as what they are, how they're different from other types of connected stories such as series, how to connect them, and how you can use them in your own work. In addition, we'll be workshopping the connection and outlining parts, so you can work along with me as I work on my own project. My name is Kit Campbell. I'm a hybrid author, which means I'm both traditionally and Indie published. I've also been a freelance editor, a manager of an Indie press, a book formatter, and a very occasional cover designer. This class is part of the writers Motivation series, which is a series of books, workbooks and classes designed to help writers like you find the processes that are going to best help you reach your writing goals. So this class is designed for more experienced authors who would like to try a new story structure. If you are a new writer or you've never finished a story, you may find some of the parts of this class a little bit challenging. It may help to try one of my other classes first, many of which are designed for beginner writers. This class is also designed for novelists who want to try writing short stories, but find the idea of a smaller footprint a little intimidating or for short story writers who would like to try something longer but not go all the way into a novel yet. So at the end of this class, you will have a new skill, a space in which to try that new skill, and you can add additional dimensions to your work. The project for this class will be to put together a plan for an interconnected short story project. So we will go through selecting goals for those projects, how to pick, and then picking connections that will work, and then we will go through how to outline those stories as well. By the end of the class, you will understand what interconnected short stories are and how to use them in your own writing, and you will have a usable plan that you can use to start writing your own project from. So let's get started. 2. What are Interconnected Short Stories?: First, what is an interconnected short story? In their simplest description, interconnected short stories are a selection of short stories that have a thread of connection between them. This connection can be tenuous, perhaps only realized by the author themselves or run through every aspect of each story. The connection can be a fun Easter egg or essential to the story or stories as a whole. We'll talk more about the levels of connection in a later section. What can you do with interconnected short stories? Again, we'll go into this in more detail in the later section. But like many things with writing, interconnected short stories can be used for a number of different purposes, depending on your personal writing goals. At one end, you can write them for fun to see what you can create over time with no limits but your imagination. If you've been writing for a while, you may want to try something new. Such as exploring new structures and story forms. They can be helpful for compiling cohesive short story collections. And in perhaps their purest form, you can tell complete stories through interconnected short stories in a form known as a composite novel or a short story cycle. You may be asking what separates interconnected short stories from other interrelated forms of storytelling, such as series or serials. Length is a major component. Interconnected short stories are in the name, short stories. You can attempt interconnected novellas or novels, but the form loses some of its essence in long form. It begins to look like a series at that point, though it may be unconventional. Interconnected short stories have their connections, which we'll talk about more next lesson, but they do not necessarily tell a coherent long form story, though many do. Those that do tell a complete story usually do so in a single volume without the story being spread across multiple long form works. And often interconnected short stories are used to explore aspects of a story, such as the world or the characters without as much focus on the main plot, if there is one. Series are almost always made up of novelas or novels and have a continuous narrative that is told over the entire work. Alternately, in the case of a mystery or thriller or romance series, the series may have a standalone plot in each book, but a main character or characters who are followed as they grow and change. A serial is a single work broken up into smaller installments. They were especially popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s when installments were often shared in newspapers and magazines, and they have seen a resurgence on the Internet. While each installment might be short story length, they do not make sense on their own. And the next section we'll explore ways to connect your short stories. 3. Connections: In this lesson, we'll look at potential threads to connect your short stories. We're going to go and order from the least amount of connection to the most. First up is genre, which is what tropes and topics a story covers. I have a class on genre, if you need it, but I would guess most of you know what genre is. I would also argue that genre is not strong enough to create interconnected short stories on its own without a second form of connection. If one wanted to make a short story collection, where the stories are otherwise unrelated, genre can be a good connection. After all, most people don't read collections if the genres are all over the place with a romance next to a thriller and so on. Next, we have theme. Your theme is the main messaging or idea that runs through your story. It can be essentially anything. Love conquers all. Be true to yourself. Family is deeper than blood. Most stories have a theme. For connected short stories, you can write a variety of stories with the same theme or as variations on that theme. For example, if your theme is love conquers all, you could write a story focusing on first love, on an old couple who has spent 50 years together, on a couple dealing with the loss of a child. Like genre, theme is a looser connection. It is a stronger thoroughfare, but again, you could write wildly different stories with the same theme. However, theme pairs well with some of the other elements we'll discuss, and you compare them with all the stories having the same theme or having a larger arcing theme that runs through all the stories together. Our next element is characters. For the sake of interconnected short stories, using a single character or a collective are both options available to you. Characters are the people who inhabit the world. I used quotations because they don't have to be people in the traditional sense. Animals, magical beings, sometimes even buildings and settings can be characters. A single character connection might be taking a character and writing stories about various points in their life. When they fell out of a tree when they were five, when they got their best friend, their dog, when they were eight. When they found out they were the prophesized child when they were 11, their first love, college, marriage, defeating the Dark Lord, you get the point. You may also see a series of short stories that each have the same character like Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories. These don't focus on the character themselves so much as use them as the connection between stories of the same genre. As for collective characters, these are often paired with some other connections that we'll talk about shortly, such as a place or an event. You might focus each story on a different character who lives in the same town or jump around a cruise ship or focus on a single family throughout the generations. Our next connection is place, which is a location that has relevance to the story or stories. This is different than a setting because the place that is the connection does not have to be the place the story is happening. So it can be. Our place connection may be that the main characters of each story grew up in the same town or that everyone had something in their backgrounds happen in the same place, which is influencing the present of the story. But it can also be a town that all the stories take place in or showing those influential events. If you're writing a short story cycle or a composite novel, place is often a common connection used to connect all the stories together. Next, we have events and objects as connections. These can be easily combined with other connections such as place or character. In the cases of interconnected stories, an event is something that will permeate each individual short story. For a broad example, if our event is World War two, we could write a story from the point of view of a farmer in France, a resistance fighter, an allied soldier trapped behind enemy lines, a Nazi soldier starting to have second thoughts, a Jewish person trapped in Germany. To add to the connections, we could take all these people and put them in a specific city. And from there, you could also add in a theme like, say, always do what is right. To use an example of a published composite novel, let's look at how high we go in the dark by Sakoya Nagamatsu. The central event that sits at the heart of each of the short stories making up the larger novel is a climate induced pandemic. Now, an object in the case of interconnected stories might be a cursed amulet that falls into a variety of hands, with each story being about a new owner or a magic sword, a statue, a work of art. The object and the event may not be the main point of any particular story in the collection, but is the connection that runs through all the stories. Next, we have exploration of a subject or theme. Now, you might say, Kit, how does this differ from the theme we talked about a little bit ago? We used love conquers all as our example when we talked about theme. If we were going to do an exploration instead, we might use love as our core and then perhaps have a story about first love and another about toxic love and one about platonic love. The idea here is to take one thing and use it to write stories from different angles. To make the stories more connected, it's easy to add in other elements that may be more obvious to the readers, such as characters, places or events. Love in a time of war. Families in a town that's grown stagnant. You get the idea. My last connection thread that we'll talk about is plot. Your plot is the series of events in your story. What happens from the start to the finish. Well, this is a more essential element in many story forms. It's actually one of the hardest connections to use for interconnected short stories. Because interconnected short stories often cover a wide range of characters and events, the main plot is often lost behind the content of each individual story. If you focus on the plot instead, it starts to morph more into a traditional novel. Composite novels and short story cycles do often have a plot that ties the story together, but more often, it'll be based on character, place or event with the plot being more in the background. Now that we've gone through the threads you can use to create interconnected short stories, how do you actually put them into use? Our first step is to decide what your end goal is. We'll talk more about why you might want to write interconnected short stories in the next section, but some connections work better for different goals. Next, we pick our connection or connections. As we've discussed, connections work well together and it's possible to use multiple in a single project or stick to just one. Once we know our goals and how we want to achieve them, it's time to outline your stories. And I do highly recommend outlining. Depending on your goals and your connection, it can be difficult to make sure each story does what it needs to do without some sort of pre planning. That being said, there are some situations where you would be able to skip this step. Again, we'll touch on this in the next section. After you know what you're writing, go ahead and write them. And then edit them taking care that they're doing what they're meant to for your vision. It can help to read the stories in the order they go in to make sure they make sense in context, and the thread that you're following makes logical sense as you go. Once the stories are good to go, you're free to do with them what you will, whether that's using them for your own education and enjoyment or pursuing publication. And our next section we'll talk about why we might want to write interconnected short stories. 4. Why Connect Stories?: In this section, we'll talk about why we might want to write interconnected short stories. Our first reason is world building and character development. World Building is a term that is often associated with speculative fiction like fantasy and science fiction, but really all genres use some world building, even if it's just establishing that a story takes place in a real place in the modern day. You can use interconnected short stories to explore your world so that you can know it better and the same with your characters. For instance, you can explore Interesting locations, cultural habits, historical events, mythology, character backstory, such as why they are the way they are, and side character motivations. Well, this can be interesting on its own. For example, imagine if you will, an atlas of a fictional world told in short stories or a character's life told in small bits. This can also be useful for more traditional projects. I've used this for years to explore and add depth to my fantasy novels. Stories of important meetings between characters that happened before the main narrative, important events in characters' lives that happened off screen, even some scenes that do exist in the book, but from other characters points of view. These exercises allow me to know my characters and my world much deeper than I would be able to otherwise, which allows me to translate that depth into the main stories. Another reason why you may want to write interconnected short stories will be to create additional content for stories that already exist. If you're an Indie author, you may want to create reader magnets to go along with your novels or novellas. Traditionally published authors can also do this, but it tends to be expected in Indie spaces. Readers love getting more information about worlds and characters they enjoy. Think of all the classic books, movies and TV shows that get spin offs, retellings, and modern revamps. There's no reason you can't do that with your own works as well. Reader magnets and other shorts can be used for a variety of purposes. You can offer one when someone signs up for your newsletter or as a thank you to your loyal blog subscribers. Or you can put them in the back of novels as an incentive to get someone to buy the book. One of the most common reason people write interconnected short stories is because they hope to tell a larger story through the medium. Novel length works of interconnected short stories are called composite novels or short story cycles and often have a tangible connection that connects each of the stories into a semi cohesive whole. The connections you see most often these works are places and events. Examples of composite novels include Cloud Atlas, I Robot, the Martian Chronicles, the Red Garden, and Olive Kitterige. As we discussed in the connection section, you can also use interconnected short stories for a short story collection. The stories in these collections are often only related through a single connection, which is often something more nebulous like genre or theme. Short story collections do not necessarily need to have their stories connected at all, though they feel more cohesive to the reader if they do. And lastly, sometimes it's just fun to try something new. I know that while nano mo existed. I often use the event to try something out of my comfort range, new genres, new structures, different points of view. Nobody wants to only crochet scarves, and sometimes we as authors want to write something a little more complicated or different from what we typically do, and that's fine. Our next section will be one of our workshop sections where we'll talk about choosing connections. 5. Connections Workshop: Hello. This is the first of the workshop sessions for this class. And this one we'll be looking at the connection specifically, such as how we pick which connections we want to use, and then kind of how we get them set up for actually writing those stories. So I find that the interconnected short story projects kind of fall into two distinct groups. The first of which is exploration, and then the second of which is if you're trying to do a composite novel or a short story cycle, where the idea is that at the end, you're going to kind of have a more or less cohesive narrative. But on the exploration side, you have exploration of character, of place, of theme. And then if you're looking at doing a composite novel, you kind of have to have some sort of arc that goes through all the stories to create that more cohesive whole. So first thing is to pick your goal for your project. So for me, I'm going to take a world that I have worked in for probably two decades. It's a secondary fantasy world. I have a epic fantasy trilogy I've written in it and a stand alone kind of coming of age. Why a novel that I've written as well. And that's going to be my focus, this world and specifically a kind of sentient forest that occupies the northern part of the main continent. So I said in the theory part that I have used interconnected short stories for years to kind of explore the stories. And I have done that for these stories as well, but I've really focused on the characters, you know, what did this character do as a child? How did these characters meet? What is the antagonist thinking? What is their plan? I've used it more for character development and character fleshing out than setting development, if that makes sense. I've reached the point where I'm looking to get those four novels that I've written out into the world, and how can I help my chances. How can I invite readers into the world in new ways? So that's kind of my goal is to write short stories that take place in this sentient forest that I have created, not necessarily related to the novels, not the same characters, not the same time period, not even necessarily the same areas of that forest, but to use that forest as my connection. And then the point is not to have a cohesive storyline or anything. It's really an exploration of the place. And I'm also toying with potentially adding theme into those stories. And if I do that, I think the theme I will use is be true to yourself, which is a nice broad theme that I can get a lot of mileage out of. So where the short stories I've previously rented connected to this have been more for myself, you know, short, 500 to 2000 word vignettes almost the goal here is to write complete short stories that I could potentially publish in, like, a magazine or an anthology. So that's my goal, a series of short stories that is connected to this world that I've already created with the hope of publication. That's my goal. And then as we talked about, the connections that I'm going to use is place and then also potentially theme. Now, your goals will probably be different and your connections will look different, as well, based on what you want to do. If you are looking to do a composite novel, for example, you might look at, you know, an event that you can travel along the entire timeline with different characters or perhaps a town to show I mean, towns you can do so much with you can focus on the types of people who live there or the timeline of the town or any number of things really. But with the composite novel, if that's what you want to do, you do need to make sure that your connection is fairly strong between all the stories. After we have picked our goal and we have picked our connections, the next thing that we need to do is look at the entire shape of the project. And with an exploration goal, this is less important, but it's more important the more structure the connections and the goal has to have so one thing to consider here is how many short stories do you need to accomplish your goal? With a lot of exploration goals, you can kind of do as many as few as you want. With a composite novel, you have to think about, you know, what's the final word count of the entire project and knowing what kind of is the goal for the final length. About how long should each story be? And do you want fewer long stories or more short stories, and then how does the transition between the number of stories you have affect the reading of the entire work? I know that's a lot to think about all at once. So what I normally do at this point where I have selected my goal and I've selected my connections is to make a planning document, and my planning document starts out as just a list of ideas. And it's basically any idea that could potentially be put into one of these short stories. So we've been kind of staring at my planning document for this project. Right now, it is a list of bullet points of random story ideas. And I also have a Pintrisbard that I have made to go along with this. And again, this is just basically anything that kind of pinged my muse as I was looking at it has gone onto this Pintrisbard. Now, I've already done this for this story for myself. If you feel the need to do this, this would be the time to do it before you really are focusing down on which stories are going to be about what and how long they're going to be and how many you need and all that. So when I am putting together these planning documents where it's literally just, like, a list of stuff, I have idea documents where I put things as they catch my interest, like little bits of character or dialogue or premises that I'm just finding out in the world. And I just put them all together. And then when I need ideas for stories, I just kind of go back through them and pull out the ones that I like and that are relevant to the current project and transfer them over to the other document. And then I also have Pintrisbards that are kind of the same thing. So let's see. I've got writing prompts, for example, that I'll go through, and then I'll add those onto the project specific Pintrsbard. I would recommend that you two have some sort of Ida storage system. And I think I have a class about that actually, which I will link in the comments if I do some sort of Ida storage systems so that when you come across things that interest you, you can just put them somewhere and then you can find them again later when you need them for something. So I use Google Docs, which I know you don't have to tell me. And Pintris which, again, you don't have to use those. You can use whatever you like, whatever works for you. So to wrap up, at this point, you should do the following if you have not already. One, pick your project goal. Two, pick your connections. Three, figure out the basic shape of your overall project, and then four, gather ideas if necessary and place them into a central planning document. We'll also revisit these steps when we talk about the project later on in the class. And the next section we'll do another workshop section where we will talk about how to figure out how long your story should be and work on outlining. See you there? Pre 6. Outlining Workshop: All right. After the last workshop, we should have all done the following. One, we should have picked our goal for our project, whether we're doing an exploration project or a more complete composite novel project. Two, we should have picked which connections we are going to use for Sad project. Three, we should have kind of thought about what we wanted the project to look like overall, and four, we should have gathered all our ideas into a single place if we needed to do so. Arguably, I would say, this is always a good idea to do. You don't necessarily need to scroll through your idea documents and make a list of random ideas the way I do. It could be that you already came into the project kind of knowing what the story was about, and you could just write those down. But it is good to have all your ideas and all your notes in one place. So as we talked about in last video, I'm going to do an exploration sort of project focusing on place and perhaps theme. And I've decided I'm going to write five stories. If you're doing a composite novel, you probably need to think about total word length, which usually falls somewhere 50-100 thousand words depending on your genre. And you will need to take a minute to kind of think about how you want that to look if you want fewer long stories, if you want more short stories, if you don't really care that the stories are more or less an equal length, and you'd like a variety of lengths, if you'd like to revisit people or places or events or have everyone show up once and then never seen again. Those are all things you kind of need to have already thought about at this point. So the publication process for a composite novel works more or less like a normal novel, where you would potentially query to an agent who would then pitch it to an editor, or you might be able to pitch it directly to an editor depending on the market. But for exploration short stories, which usually either get sold at a short story collection or as single short stories, you would want to do a little bit of market research. Short story collections are notoriously hard sells, especially to do traditionally. Generally, they are only offered to people who either have a large amount of award winning short stories or with established novelists. So if that's something you want to do, you may need to look into that a little more. If you are planning to publish the stories individually, it helps to do some market research. So the website I use when I'm doing research for markets for short stories is called The Submission Grinder. It's run by diabolical plots. It's very complete and it's free, which is helpful. And you can track your submissions on it like you do with subscription sites such as Duotrop. You can search by genre, and then you can add in additional stuff like, you know, if they take reprints minimum price that they pay, if you know the word count of your stories, you would put it in here. So what I did to make my list of markets for this project is just search fantasy, the genre. And this will take a minute further. Oh, this is a new market. Hold on. Alright, so it will give you a list of results. So searching by genre, this is every market that it currently has on that is open. It's only searching open markets that accept fantasy stories. This one is a new one. I'm going to open that. Tells you the name of the press if they're open, and then what genres they accept. This one takes fantasy, horror, and science fiction, then what lengths they accept? This one takes flash fiction. This one takes novels and novellas and novelts. Short story collection. They're publishing books. This one would also be publishing books. And then how much their pain per word if they know, and then the average response time after you submit. So if you go to the individual page, it shows you, again, the name, a description, submission windows, if they're not open all the time, genres again. This place is doing stories that are exactly 100 words giving you $8 for those. Yeah, so length, what they are including in that length. So you might see like one place might say short story and that is 1,000 to 5,000 words and another place might say short story and that's 2000 to 6,000 words. So it's specifically what that market is calling that type of story, and then how much they pay. Then down here, it's got like Stats on who submitted, green is acceptances, red is rejections. Purple is pending, so this one doesn't have any because it looks like it's got distinct reading periods. So anyway, I'm going to close that. Here's one I've picked as being applicable to my project. So again, it's the same general information as on the last one and this one also has won some awards. So let's go at the top. Now, you can't pick a market purely based off of what genres it says it accepts because just because something takes fantasy doesn't mean it takes my kind of fantasy, for example. Some people only take urban fantasy or romanticy or things that are not what I'm working on right now. So only take dark fantasy or Hora Jason fantasy. So you do need to look closely at each market and make sure it actually fits for the project you are working on. The best way to do that is to first filter down using the submission grinder and then go to each market's individual website. So this is beneath Ceasless skies. They're a secondary World fantasy magazine, and then you can potentially read some example stories to make sure it works for your project. And then you can also look at their submission page. And the submission pages are very helpful. It tells you specifically what kind of story they are looking for as well as things like how long of a story they accept. If they accept reprints, a lot of ones have an AI statement now. If they accept multiple submissions, which is where you send them more than one story at once, if they accept simultaneous submissions, which is where you have sent the same story to multiple markets at the same time, and then things like which rights are they putting you under contract for? How much are they paying and things like that. So I have gone ahead and made a market list for this project, where I have listed the market, the length of stories they accept, which genres they accept, the payment and the submission method, which really comes down to either some sort of form, which can be one directly on their website that they run themselves. It can be a third party form such as Mosca or submittable, or it could be a Google form. Or they take submissions through email, either with the story in the body of the email or as an attachment. I've also listed the websites and then any notes that are applicable that I need to think about. This one only takes anonymous submissions, so I would have to remove my name from the manuscript when I submit it. This one is not currently open, but would open in June. This one pays a $20 minimum for each story. This one plays in Euros. Anything that is interesting, like this one has a theme. And then so I came up with 35 potential markets. And the ones in green are ones that I feel are good fits, and then the ones in yellow are a little more squiggly, perhaps not my first choice when I'm submitting the stories. So this can be helpful. If you're not sure how long each story should be, you can kind of see what the magazines in your genre are accepting and that can help you if you're not sure on your story length. So for fantasy, a lot of them go up to, like, 5,000, but some go up to more, 9,000, 10,000. This one's 22,000 15,000. So I could write longer stories if I wanted. There's less of a market for, like, flash fiction, but, like, there are a couple if I wanted to do that. So it's a good idea to know what length is acceptable in the genre that you are trying to write. All right. If you have any questions about market research or anything like that, please ask them in the comments down below. Let's go back to our personal documents and work on our next steps. So as I showed you, last video, here are my list of ideas. And I have gone ahead and down here at the bottom, I have split these bullet points of interesting ideas into five potential stories. This is not all of them. It's just the ones that kind of combine together nicely into what I could see being a story. And it is a mix of the bullet points and the Pinterest so the next step after you've divided up your story ideas into individual stories is to do brainstorming on those stories. And I have already done that because it's kind of boring to watch, and it took me a while. So feel free to pause the video here and do that yourself. What the point of the brainstorming is to go from those ideas, kind of hodgepodge of ideas into working out the shape of the story, just the general shape of the story so that you reach a point where you can outline the story. So I have gone through and picked word counts for each story. I find it helpful to kind of know how long I expect a story to go before I start my outlining. We're going to go through two different outlining methods as part of this workshop. If you're interested in learning more about outlining, I have two different outlining classes. One, the outlining workshop I mentioned before and two a class about different types of outlines if you don't have a method that you use for yourself. With this first story, story one, I think it's going to be shorter about 1,500 words. I'm going to use a method I call phase outlining, which is basically just taking bullet points and being like, this happens, then this happens, then this happens, and then this happens. All the way through, start to finish. Actually, I'm going to I'm going to bold these real quick so I can find them later. Okay. So this first story, I have picked Ribra as a time travel device sitting in the water to have some peace. And then this Pintrs image, which is kind of a cool cave with a waterfall in it, looks kind of mystical. My Internet is slow. Alright. So I have my brainstorming. This one gave me a little bit of trouble because I had the location, of course, because that is the thoroughfare through all these stories. And I had a premise where the Rivers the time travel device. But I didn't have a character, so it took me a minute to kind of go through and figure out what the story was going to be about. Basically, the story is going to take place in an older time period when there's different clans are at war with each other. And the main character is going to be a healer, who is going to find someone who is injured in the forest and take care of them because that's their nature, even though they're a member of a warring clan, and they're going to fall in love and be discovered and cast out of their own clan basically for betraying them. And the way this society is set up, your clan membership, especially back then, is so important. And without your clan, without your profession, you don't really have anything. So this is devastating. And so this person is going to go in search of this mystical, uh, that's not the right word. Mythological river of time so they can go back in time, you know, change the past, decide not to save this person and stay in their clan. And so the story is going to be they do it. They go back in time. They go back to where they found this person. But instead of letting them die, they can't, uh they ht go against their own nature, basically. So even though they have the opportunity to change the past, they don't, because as I said, one of the connections I'm using is the theme to be true to yourself. And what sort of healer let someone die, especially someone that they will care about. So that's the basic shape of the story. So let's see. Let's start the story where we find the injured person. And the bullet points here can be very general. So I'm not planning on this story being very long. So this will probably be a series of, like, small vignettes, like, a section where they find the person, a section where they heal the person maybe a montage sort of thing. And then, like, a section where they're found out, a section where they go through the emotions of being cast out. And then a section where they go back in time. In the final section. Although, now that I'm talking it out, maybe I want it to be longer than I initially thought. All right. So these bullet points can really be as specific or as general as you want. Falls in life. Falls in love. If you know your specifics, write them down. If you need to figure them out as you go, then the general ones are fine. Yeah, so I'm actually going to make a note here because we need some sort of motivation for them to want to change the past, some sort of goal that they were close to that this action has denied to them. Actually, Drama. Okay. So basically, they've had a consequence now for nothing because they don't even get anything out of it. Also, up here, we will need to introduce the river time concept. It can't come out of nowhere down in the middle of the story. This has to be something that's established at the beginning. Okay. Yeah, so the nice thing about the phase outlining is you can basically go back and forth, you know, as you think of stuff earlier, you can add more stuff in. You can flesh out your bullet points as you go. There's a lot of flexibility to this method. All right. So this is a very simple outlining form. It doesn't give me a lot of specifics, but it gets the job done. And it's good for shorter stories. I use this method for anything less than about 5,000 words. All right. And then for story two, let's close that one. For story two, you got to stop doing that. Click on this part. Okay, so story two, the story ideas I used to build this story and then my soul saw you and kind of went, Oh, there you are. I've been looking for you. And then the idea of a shield character, a character whose main purpose is to protect someone else. And then I also included these ones. So here's a character, potentially, and then pretending I don't love you behaviors. And I prompt write about soul mates who refused to be together. So I'm not a huge romance writer myself, but I do sometimes like to have it be a major subplot in my stories. So for my brainstorming, I was kind of like, Why? Why would people in love not be together? And what I basically came up with is that they have to have some sort of core ideological disagreement. So I ended up with a priestess character who was going to want peace and not want the clans to war with each other and essentially a soldier. So there is my ideological clash. And basically, they were in love. They had this disagreement. Soldier went off to war, and they essentially lost contact. But in this culture, everyone bonds for life. So it's hard to move on to other people. Plus, I am unsure if the priestesses, no, I take that back. The priestesses can bond actually. Alright, so that's the core conflict. And then the idea like the plot of the story would be that this soldier character is assigned to protect this priestess character on some sort of journey and they have to learn to trust each other again and let past disagreements go and get through this mission and then potentially end on a positive beat where perhaps the relationship can go somewhere again. All right. So I foresee this being a longer story because I need to have time for the relationship to build up. I've used my other main outlining technique here. Well, I haven't used it yet. I've set it up, which is a six act six Act. It's really three acts, but kind of broken down a little more than usual, where you have sections that build up to major plot points. So you can see stage one is setup. Turning 0.1 is opportunity. This is essentially the inciting incident, stage two, new situation. Turning 0.2, change of plans. And so forth. I'm not going to read these all to you. You can read. I've also made note of up here, I need an internal arc and an external arc. What I do need to do now is decide, first of all, how many viewpoints am I doing? Probably just one because it's a short story. Then which viewpoint? Because I don't know my arcs until I know my characters. I am leaning towards doing the soldier character as the viewpoint character, though, because he or she actually. Well, I suppose a priestess by default has to be female. Still could be a she. Anyway, the soldier character perhaps as a more interesting story, more interesting arc. So I think I will do them as the viewpoint character. So I will make a note of that. We'll figure out genders later. Their internal arc is learning to be more than just a shield slash sword. The external arc is they've got to did I decide where I wanted them to go Sacred Place. Okay. So the external arc is to get the priestess someplace safely and back again. So of course, you should have an internal and an external arc and basically any story. The shorter the story, the less complicated you can get, especially for a long short story, you can put in an internal arc to give it to more depth. All right. So the way this method works involves math. So I picked 7,500 words as my goal for this story. So then this is essentially 10%. This is 25%. This is half, this is 75%, and this is 90%. If you need to do the math for yourself, I used a calculator because this number is madness. And of course, you don't have to be exact. I don't have to have my turning point exactly at 750 words, especially because it's not going to be a single word. It's kind of a guideline, you know? About this point, this happens. About this point, this happens. And I find this very helpful for me because my pacing is not always as instinctive as I would like it to be. And so this helps me know, Okay, I need to be at this point at this time to make the story flow correctly. So if you also have pacing issues, this is amazing. Alright, so stage one, the setup, this is kind of your here's what the person is doing in their normal everyday life time. So maybe our soldier character helps if you can type. This is more, hold on. Alright. So it would be good here to have some sort of situation that kind of shows off the main character's personality and makes a good juxtaposition for later when they kind of have a change of heart. Mm, I may come back to that point. Alright. Let's see. So soldier and priestess we The important thing to note about outlining is that they are live documents. You don't have to outline and then stick to that outline. So if you outline a point and then later on, you're like, Oh, this works so much better, go ahead and change the outline. The point of the outline is to help you write the story. And if you need to change it to help you help write the story, then change it. Sometimes it's also helpful, if you're not quite sure what the shape of the story should look like to jump around on your points here. So, like, Well, let's see. All right. So I'm actually going to jump ahead to the climax and then build backwards. The internal arc is this character learning that they don't always have to fight and also to trust this other person that maybe there's something to their viewpoint that they can learn from. So the climax here needs to be something where they go to fight and then decide not to because of this journey. You can see how specific I'm being. Something attacks. But again, you can write your first draft of the outline and then go back and modify it, expand it as you go. Sometimes just getting the basics down will kind of jog your creative juices and get things flowing, and then it'll be easier to expand points. So because the main focus of this particular story is the journey, I don't need to do the coming back. The getting there can kind of be the end of the story with the promise of things to come. Oh, it might help if I actually look at what's Oh, I did already. Away. Mm hmm. So I would actually say perhaps the internal arc is the more important arc on this particular story. A lot of times the internal arc is kind of the background arc. Like, it's important, but what's taking the forefront is the external arc, the plot, the events that are happening in the story. But I think with this kind of story might actually be better to focus more on the internal arc on the relationship between the characters and their interpersonal conflicts and then have the journey itself be more in the background. It may also be helpful here to have some sort of backstory where something happened to this character when they were younger that has made them ultra protective. And then we can work through that also. Now, backstory, of course, you don't want to info dump at any point. You just want hints of it here and there little tiny bits, bread crumbs to be followed, but not to throw in people's faces. So technical. Something happened. Um Okay, I'm going to go through and finish outlining this, and then we will talk again. Okay. All right. So now I have the basic flow of this story in here. I can go back through and make it more detailed now or I can start to write the story and flesh out the different points as I move along. It's really up to me. Those are the two outlining techniques that we are going to go through in this workshop, the phase outlining for shorter stories. Literally just this happens, then this happens, then this happens. Then the six Act Put 0.1 here, which is more detailed and helps with pacing. So next steps from here. One, write your stories, then read your stories, and then edit them based on whether or not they are doing what they need to be doing for your project, and then if necessary, move your stories around. The nice thing about interconnected short stories is that they're really easy to manipulate, so you know if this story will work better before this story, you can just move it or if this story needs to be split apart and kind of broken up, easy to do. In our next video, we will do our project introduction and the wrap up of the class. 7. Wrap-Up and Project Introduction: We've come to the project introduction and wrap up section of the class. In this class, we've discussed interconnected short stories. Interconnected short stories are short stories that have a thread of connection between them, which can be obvious and important or can be subtle and perhaps only known to the author. Possible types of connection include genre or the tropes a story uses. Theme, a main message that provides meaning, characters, both individual or a collective, a place both as a setting or as an idea, Aan object or event an exploration of subject or a theme and plot. You can use a single connection or multiple as fits your purpose. You can use interconnected short stories for a number of different reasons such as creating deeper, richer worlds through world building and or character development. Creating reader incentives by spending more time in the world's readers love. Creating composite novels or short story cycles, which are a single novel length work made up of many stories or just to add a new form into your writing repertoire. Now that we know what interconnected stories are, how to make connections, and how to use them, we're going to put our knowledge to practical use. Feel free to do these on your own or follow along with the workshop sections of the class. Our first step is to identify what our goal is. Are we writing shorts that will be used to make a larger piece, expanding an existing story or world or just trying something for fun. Next, choose your connection or connections. Are you going to use something more subtle like theme or something more obvious like place? Then we'll pick how many stories we intend to write and lastly, we'll outline them using whatever methods work for you. You're welcome to reference my outlining class if you would like. I've linked it in the project description. The supplies we'll need for this project are a notebook or computer or both, whatever you tend to use for brainstorming and outlining and an open mind and a willingness to try something new. Like any new skill, this may not come as easily the first time through and give yourself grace and patience. Please post your connection or connections and the number of stories you intend to write here in the project section. You're welcome to post your outlines as well if you feel comfortable or just a log line for each story. If you run into any issues, please leave a comment, and I'll come and help you troubleshoot. After you finished writing your stories, it would be amazing if you could come back and share how it went and any lessons you learned or any issues you ran into. Good luck and happy writing. But