Recently I decided that a short story I had written could be expanded into novel length or at least a novella. Once I had accomplished that bit of work, I could submit it to my publisher to release it as an e-book. The story was a modern retelling of Sleeping Beauty, with a twist ending. Here is a brief synopsis: a young man of college age takes co-ed of his acquaintance on a trip to New England to browse through antique stores. His hidden motive is to seduce her. While browsing through an antique store, the proprietor talks him into buying a small ornate wooden box. When he opens the box, he finds an old-fashioned iron key. His attempts at seduction fail miserably. When they return to the campus, she begins to see the star of the football team. Heartbroken, our hero goes on a guided tour of some Eastern Europe countries, including Romania where his ancestors originated. He leaves the tour to visit the village where his relatives live.
On a hill overlooking the hamlet is a ruined castle. He is told that it is forbidden to go there. He has a dream that a sleeping beauty lies there. Determined to see what is really in the castle, he disobeys his uncle and heads for the castle, but finds it surrounded by a thick poisonous thorn hedge. By using a chain saw he makes his way through the hedge and enters the castle. What he finds there is my secret. You'll have to buy the e-book if you're interested :) All of this is told in the first person. The first thing I did to convert it to novel length is divide it into chapters, making each scene a separate chapter. Now, in a short story, pretty much all we know about the characters is what their action reveal about them. So I beefed up the main characters, giving background information and other detail about them. I had to do this without slowing the pace of the story too much. Next I added new scenes. Where in the short story I might have had a sentence that simply made a statement about something that occurred simply to move the story along, I invented an entire scene to show everything that happened in detail.
Then I beefed up information about the locations and other background and environmental factors. Since part of the story was set on a tour of Eastern Europe, which I had also experienced, it was relatively easy to fill in detail about the places the protagonist visited during his trip. By this time I had added a fair amount of wordage to the original story. As I edited for grammar and errors, I also found many places where I could beef the narrative and added a lot of enhancements of mood, imagery and foreshadowing. All in all, it turned out fairly well. I raised the word count from five thousand words to a novella of over twenty thousand. This made it eligible for publishing as an e-book by my publisher. It has not yet been released. My working title was The Key. I don't know whether it will be released with that title, howeve.
Then I beefed up information about the locations and other background and environmental factors. Since part of the story was set on a tour of Eastern Europe, which I had also experienced, it was relatively easy to fill in detail about the places the protagonist visited during his trip. By this time I had added a fair amount of wordage to the original story. As I edited for grammar and errors, I also found many places where I could beef the narrative and added a lot of enhancements of mood, imagery and foreshadowing. All in all, it turned out fairly well. I raised the word count from five thousand words to a novella of over twenty thousand. This made it eligible for publishing as an e-book by my publisher. It has not yet been released. My working title was The Key. I don't know whether it will be released with that title, howeve.