Roisín O’Donnell on Developing a Short Story into a Novel

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“Mrs Dalloway said that she would buy the gloves herself.” So begins a short story published by Virginia Woolf in a literary journal in 1923. Exchange the word “gloves” for “flowers,” and you have the opening line of one of the world’s most famous novels. Mrs. Dalloway was published two years later, expanding this original scene into a modernist masterpiece.

In 2016, Sally Rooney, an as-yet fairly unknown Irish author, published a short story in The White Review called “At the Clinic,” in which a young man called Connell is driving his friend Marianne to have her wisdom teeth removed. Most of us will recognize Connell and Marianne from Normal People, Rooney’s Booker-nominated bestseller. Here you can see their dynamic fully realized, in shorter form.

Short stories can contain multitudes, like lotus flowers that expand in the mind of the reader. Still, the idea of developing a story into a novel had never occurred to me until autumn 2020, when I was commissioned to write a short story for radio on the theme of “independence.” Approaching the centenary of Irish independence, writers were asked to reflect on what independence meant to them. This was at the height of the pandemic, when we were all being told to “stay home, stay safe.” But what if home was the least safe space you could be?

I wrote a story called “Present Perfect,” which was read for radio by Siobhán McSweeney, of Derry Girls fame. It unfolds over a single day filled with struggles and small triumphs for Ciara Fay, a single mother living in homeless accommodation in the Hotel Eden. Partly it tilts towards the absurd. The eldest child, Sophie, has been asked to produce a piece of homework titled “My Home,” while the youngest girl, Ella, has an encounter with the community nurse from hell. This nurse induces such panic in Ciara that she is flung unwittingly into a moment of cleansing rage, and revelation. I gave Present Perfect the short story treatment, redrafting multiple times, editing it to within an inch of its life, scrutinising every word. But as I listened to the story being broadcast on national radio, I had a niggling feeling of dissatisfaction. The story was straining against its form. It wasn’t finished.

About a week later, Ciara Fay’s voice floated into my head, so strong that I felt compelled to write down her words. After that, scenes began emerging in my mind. The hotel. A classroom. A refuge. Questions spun. How had Ciara ended up in emergency accommodation? Would her family be okay? I had landed my characters in a horrible situation and abandoned them on a knife’s edge. Hands on hips, Ciara insisted, “Don’t you want to know what happens next?” I would have to write a novel to find out.

The text of “Present Perfect” does not appear anywhere in Nesting. No homework, no evil nurses. Rather than using the story as my novel opening, I took the essence of the short piece as a keystone. Only one scene from the short story remains pretty much intact. In the original short story, Ciara has a flashback to the day she left home, grabbing the clothes from the washing line and taking her two small children’s hands, powered by the realisation that anything would be better than the toxic, controlling home she has been living in. This moment of deciding to leave the deceptive safety of the familiar, and take a chance on the unknown, became crucial.

While my short story began with Ciara already living in the Hotel Eden, Nesting commences much further back. I was wary of using Ciara’s trauma as a plot device, having always had a distaste for trauma being dangled over the reader as a “reveal.” In a move that felt quite risky at the time, I decided to be upfront from the beginning and take the reader into Ciara’s home, to show exactly what she is fleeing. Irish writer Mary Lavin referred to the short story as “an arrow in flight,” and this sense of momentum was something I thought about constantly.

Back when I was starting out as a writer, I attended a series of workshops led by legendary Irish author Claire Keegan, who one day drew a diagram on the whiteboard, showing a typical story arc. She then pointed out that a short story takes place on the peak, whereas a novel starts on the slopes and ends much further downhill. More build-up, more denouement. Across the board she then drew a large arrow labelled “TROUBLE,” before turning to study her class good-humouredly. “This is the most important thing. You have to get your characters into trouble,” she said. Her words came back to me as I neared the midway point of Nesting. Where a short story would end, hinting at the future, the novel demanded a fuller arc. It seemed like a type of loyalty to my protagonist. Refusal to give up.

The short story form is notoriously difficult to master, referred to by Richard Ford as “the high wire act of literature.” So, what does the longer, more archaic form of the novel gain from having a short story as its origin? Sure, we could talk about editing techniques transferred from the short story form: reading aloud, going through the whole text chronologically, economy with words, foreshadowing. But I think there is something more fundamental at play here. Ray Bradbury said, “get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it.” This is where the idea of beginning with a short story finds its true value. A short story is a “big truth” in condensed form. It gets right to the heart of things. Which is a good place to start.

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Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell is available via Algonquin Books.