Just grow the plot and your characters, especially your protagonist. Describe the landscape (yes, I get bleak and dull an grey), where do they get their food? What are their clothes like, do they pop out from a machine, are they made. Do her parents touch? Do they read? How do they reconcile spending their lives as drones in a hive? She escapes, but why didn't they. Did they read to her when she was small? Does she like perfume, grapes, pictures, what color looks good on her? Why or why not? How do they travel on her home planet? Did she ever get to "drive" something? Are smells a part of memory pattern? Describe her martial art form. On page 67, would they really have a room key? Would she really give the key to Smith? Probably not. How else could he find where she was staying and access the room. What kind of communicators do they have. I mean we all have cell phones, and if I gave a room key to someone, I would call and let the others staying with me that a stranger was coming up. There is soooooo much good stuff that you want to keep it. Hey what about dangerous plants, bogs, bugs (think yellow jackets).

I think you get the gist. A lot of this stuff I did have in a later draft. But, do I really need to talk about potential plants unless, of course, said plant happens to be muching on the heroine?

Is there any way to tell when you're adding too much and when you haven't got enough (unless you have a friend willing to point out these things to you)? Any rules of thumb? I see people here talking about 100K and up works. Do these folk have the knack of coloring and I'm still working with two crayons?

I originally did my first (about to be marketed) by having multiple POV characters and going between them; also by having complications. OSC said that wasn't enough. I needed to ground the reader in the characters. I ended up striking two POV characters and lengthening and going into greater depth with the others. The "depth" meant how they felt, and sometimes their past. Of course, I don't know if this is the best way.

It is the plot itself that needs to be more complex in a novel. You have time to explore subplotsin a way that you really can't in a short story. For example, in the rought draft of my second novel (which I just FINISHED, BTW!!!), the main character is looking for a missing person. That's the main plot. As a subplot, she is still in love with someone from long ago who has come back into her life and has to choose between him and a new love interest. As another subplot, she struggles with personal choices she has made because of the world she lives in (that I won't go into because you don't understand the world). And finally, there is a strong millieu element to this as the world is different from this one, interesting, and drives the plot. (The person she's looking for is the man who screwed up the world....far future scifi) Oh, and there is this tiny little subplot with her pregnant neighbor.

All these elements come together at or near the climax. The other thing I can do in a novel that I couldn't do in a short story is take more time to resolve each conflict. The main conflict, for examle, takes the main character on a mini-tour of the midwest during which time she gets captured and has to escape, gets in the middle of a firefight, and loses her hand. (Ouch!)

It's not that each scene takes longer, it's that there are more scenes. Your plot heats up thusly:

Conflict (always start with conflict)
Action (the hero/antagoinst should almost always take this action)
Result (the hero succeeds or fails...could be mini-success or mini-setback)
Complication (Unless we're done, there should be something to complicae matters. Then you transition to the next scene).

Anyway, in a short story you can only fit a couple of these cycles in (depending upon how long they are) but in a novel you can fit more, and some can relate to the main plot and some to subplots.

Well, that's not completely true. It becomes too much when the detail is not necessary to the story or establishing the POV. Do I really need to know there are yellow jackets? Maybe.

Thanks, you guys. This type of discussion helps me a lot.

I think my friend tends to want to stroll the hillsides, smelling the flowers a little too much. If there's a pitched battle going on in the valley, nobody should care if the fighters are trampling daisies or dandelions. But, I guess some people do want to know.

"The combatants trampled the new spring dandelions and turned them red with blood."

Now the image is playing into the battle. On the other hand:

"The flowers had bloomed early that year thanks to the false spring. The hopeful yellow dandelions, fooled by the temporary warmth, suffered an even more tragic demise when the armies of combatants marched over them, crushing them beneath their heals."

Marva: I have never written a short story. I'm not sure I could. My first completed piece of fiction was a novel. I throw out any unimportant details obsessively, because to me I think they block the flow. I develop my characters and my plots, the rest isn't half so important. I find that as long as the important ideas are down, like, whether the setting is a prison cell or a cargo ship is more important than whether the cell is "gray and dreary, and haunting, with cement floors and deep casted shadows with wrought-iron bars, seven of them, and five doors, each a foot taller than the next, each being wood, cedar was the middle one, one was oak, and one was a micture of cedar and oak, one was better crafted than the other, one was slightly cracked and had more knots..." my point is most of these details, unless they have an influence on the atmosphere or the story should be left out. [My opinion.] Because they do slow things down and most of them will be glazed over with boredom, forgotten, or else unnecesarily contradict the imagination of the reader.