Post #153 January 21, 2018

“Not Too Long and Not Too Short: Novelettes and Novellas”

Novelettes and novellas have long had an unsavory reputation.  Traditionally, novelettes are stories of about 8000 to 20,000 words, novellas are stories of 20,000 to 40,000 words.  Stephen King even once called novellas a form of literary banana republic.  Yet some of our most famous stories are really novellas, including Orwell’s Animal Farm, HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. 

Why the bad rap?

To be sure, novellas are not novels and they aren’t short stories. Short stories deal with a single incident, a single problem and one main character.  There isn’t room to do to much and every word counts.  Novels are, of course, the big mansions of the literary world.  Though novels usually have one main plot line, they often have multiple subplots and plot twists, and sometimes a cast of dozens, maybe hundreds, all hopefully contributing to the main plot line.  Short stories have one plot complication.  Novels have many.

Novellas have some.

My upcoming series Time Jumpers and my already-published series Quantum Troopers consist of episodes which are novellas, about 25,000 to 40,000 words in length.  I chose this length for certain reasons.  I wanted to do a serialized story in multiple episodes and I wanted to upload episodes frequently.  You can’t really do that with a full-length novel and a short story sometimes leaves readers feeling shortchanged, wanting more.  A novella-length story seems to fit the need nicely, having as mine do, three chapters per episode.  And the basics of storytelling still apply in a novella.  Three chapters gives me a nice structure on which to hang a problem, a crisis and a resolution. 

Novellas give you more room than a short story but they’re more compact than a novel.  This means it’s more complicated than a short story, with a few more plot twists and surprises, a few more characters and enough room to digress a little to explore the characters and entangle the reader in some complications, maybe even explain some details of setting (especially important in science fiction and fantasy).  But the novella still requires the writer to stay on point and not wander off too far.

I like to think that novellas are more intense, even more emotionally powerful, than short stories and novels.  Their very compactness promotes a more concentrated response in the reader.  Novellas also require the writer to have some discipline in laying out the story, so as not to bury the reader in minutiae, as some novels do.

According to Wikipedia: The novella as a literary genre began developing in the early Renaissance by the Italian and French literatura, principally Giovanni Boccaccio, author of The Decameron (1353).^[2] The Decameron featured 100 tales (novellas) told by 10 people (seven women and three men) fleeing the Black Death, by escaping from Florence to the Fiesole hills in 1348.

Renowned science fiction author Robert Silverberg says, “The novella is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms...it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book. Thus, it provides an intense, detailed exploration of its subject, providing to some degree both the concentrated focus of the short story and the broad scope of the novel.”

And not to be ignored, novellas take less time to read.  In today’s world with so many distractions and so many demands on our attention, that is an important distinction. 

Just to be accurate, the last time I specifically checked the downloads of my series Quantum Troopers (10-15-18), downloads had exceeded 7500 copies.  That over means 7500 times, a novella-length episode was downloaded by an interested reader.  The numbers speak for themselves.

The next post to The Word Shed will come on January 28, 2019.  In this post, I will provide an update for download statistics for 2018 and a peek at what’s coming in 2019, and beyond.

See you then.

Phil B.