Is the age of the novella upon us?

Following my recent post on the length of a short story and my comment that, if your story grows and grows, maybe you are writing a novel, I should perhaps have added novella, which is a form making a welcome return because they work really well as e-books.

I have been researching the world of short novels and it seems to me that their time could be upon us once more. Folks are happy to read 30,000 words of story on their hand-helds - particularly on holiday when a book that can be finished in a day or two is welcome.

So what exactly is a novella? Well, it’s an extended short story in many ways, constructed in episodes but written in a tight and clipped way to guarantee pace.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction defined the novella as having a word count of between 17,500 and 40,000. Other definitions start as low as 10,000 words.

The novella is not a new idea. English language novellas, for example, include John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, George Orwell's Animal Farm,  Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and … I could go on.

Why are novellas so effective as a genre? Well, if you usually write novels that run to 60,000-70,000 words novellas demand cutting back big-time. An eight page scenes becomes two pages, a, 800 word passage of dialogue becomes 200, if that. It’s the mantra I teach to the many writers with whom I work across the world - does your story need those words, can they come out, will the story really suffer if they do?

 

John Dean