To give you a more thorough answer I would have to see some actual code, but I think the gist of the answer is in the file you are trying to use.
“single.php” is the template file used to display the content of a single post, as the name implies. It isn’t meant for displaying the contents of multiple posts.
You can modify this template to display multiple posts, but it usually involves putting a pretty extensive foreach loop in the page that will have it render the contents of each post in succession.
Hope that helps! If you need more info, please post the code so that I can see what is specifically going on in your theme.