If Your Novel Isn’t Working, Writing a Short Story Might Help

Writing short stories offers many advantages to the budding novelist. It can help build your credentials as a fiction writer and establish a readership. For me, there was an unexpected benefit – experimentation that led to publication.

My novel Multo (meaning ghost in Tagalog), a contemporary thriller, follows a Filipino American bounty hunter chasing the only quarry that has ever eluded him, an undocumented biracial Filipina who can disappear like a ghost. Agora Books, an imprint of Polis Books, published it in September 2023 after a very long journey.

I initially wrote the story in 1995 from the point of view of the undocumented immigrant who overstays in the U.S. to look for her American father who doesn’t know she exists. The manuscript was rejected by all the literary agents who read it, saying it was “uncommercial.”

Many years later, I decided to salvage the manuscript. Before diving into a full-fledged rewrite of the manuscript, I experimented with a short story first. The result was Domingo the Bounty Hunter, a twelve-page (3,500 words), first-person account of the first meeting between the bounty hunter and the undocumented immigrant. The Snake Nation Review published it in 2004.

My experiment informed my revision. It helped me in two major ways: finding the right narrator for the story and finding the right genre.

Read the full article in Writer’s Digest:

How Writing a Short Story Can Improve a Novel-in- Progress