Cindy started a thread on story length at FM. Here's my contribution from there:
Writing a novel is hard work, writing a short story is difficult.
A novel is a big project, like building a house by hand.
A short story demands a level of clarity and precision that's different in kind not just in scale, like crafting jewelry.
A 30,000 word Novella might take a month to write, a 3000 word short story might take an afternoon. I'll have sweated a lot on the novella, maybe making notes half as long as the story. It's like riding a mule up a mountain. The short story may have been painful or ecstatic but it's likely to have been more intense an experience to write; like riding a rocket instead of a mule.
I usually know how long a story is going to be before I get halfway down the first page, sometimes I get surprised. Sledgehammer and Sam I Am both turned out to be much shorter than I expected, novellettes instead of novels. Either could easily have a sequel.
I'm just rambling here. :)
A short story has only what the story demands in it, maybe less. If a short story grows to longer than 5000 words, it might be time to consider whether you're telling too much. It's okay not to meet all the story's demands, some of those should be supplied by the reader.
A long short story is a novelette but a lot of times a novelette is just a short story without an editor. A good novelette is the absolutely most satisfying thing to read there is, and one of the most heartbreaking to write. You've got an idea that deserves a novel but demands a short story.
A novel has everything the story deserves. If you run out of dessert at 25000 words, well, you've got a novella. :)
- Erin
I wonder if how you write
I wonder if how you write has an influence on the length?
My one effort comprises just under 213,000 words. And it took me quite a time to complete. But that was because I only came to it occasionally. I would write a page or so, sometimes even two or three, and depart to do other things for a week, two, three weeks or so. Then come back, re-read what I had written, listen to the sound of it, play with it, and perhaps write another page or so. The actual word production took no time at all. I think far faster than I can type and so it was the latter skill, or unskill, that was always the limiting factor.
I always knew where it was going, was less sure of how it would get there, and then the characters themselves developed lives of their own and, taking advantage of my good nature, tended to take charge and lead me down untrodden paths.
So it was never going to be concise. But maybe, just maybe, if I had been a proper writer and written it with a more concerted effort, a more disciplined approach, it might have been shorter, better even.
I am heartened to learn that you can ramble too Erin. Although I have this nasty suspicion that you do even that with more purpose than I ever could.
Poetry is like a jigsaw. One has a framework. One can put in the edges, link up the corners and then juggle individual words around until the desired picture emerges. Whether it takes a day or a year to fill in matters not.
But a story?
My mind cannot envisage a big enough frame even for a short story of 3,000 words. Even if I could muster enough concentration to write it in an afternoon.
And anyway I think it is probably the most difficult to do, requiring skill of a far higher order than I could ever muster. As for a novella .... (By the way I am becoming confused. Is a novella the same as a novelette?) .... I would doubtless inflate it to novel length. I am not sure why and it wouldn't be a conscious decision, but it would happen. I know it!
What I don't know is whether this is because of the spasmodic way I write or, because I am congenitally programmed to be verbose, or just because I have a sloppy, ill disciplined, chronically untidy mental approach to anything that might resemble work.
Or whether they are all the same thing. A whirling catherine wheel of chickens and eggs.
So do real writers decide early in the morning to concoct a plot for a short story? Or call upon their Muse to grant them inspiration for a novella, or novelette? Or rummage amongst the bones of past half-glimpsed, half-forgotten, ideas and depart on a journey into uncharted novel territory?
Or are they born gifted one way or another?
Hugs,
Fleurie
Storytelling jeans
I've been a storyteller since I was small, keeping my little cousins amused with blocks, spools, buttons, scraps of cloth and string that turned into all kinds of things. :) Puppeteering, really.
At ten, I started writing stories down and reading them to my classmates at lunch. These were always long, serial-style stories which seems to me the natural story form from which both the short story and the novel evolved.
A novelette is an oxymoron, a very long story, but a short story in form and function. A novella, on the other hand, is a very short novel in construction and intent.
Clear? :) Most definitions overlap and some people consider them synonyms.
- Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Synonyms
Dear Erin,
I think I might consider them as synonyms, if that's all right with you. It seems the less challenging option. I had toyed with the idea that one might be written by French national and the other by an Italian but am glad now I didn't take it further.
Hugs,
Fleurie
Story length
Most of the stories I've written have been fairly short. My one relatively long story, Bobby's Rainy Day Adventure, had been originally planned to be maybe three chapters long and under 10,000 words. Somehow, I've gotten up to around 40,000 words and the story still doesn't feel complete yet.
As much as I enjoy telling Bobby's story, I'm finding I mostly prefer writing shorter tales. I definitely see how you could compare the shorter form to a rocket ride. I find it both fun and challenging trying to put as much story as I can in as few words as possible.
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Heather Rose Brown
Author of Bobby's Rainy Day Adventure