A few years ago, had we asked anyone in the industry about our chances of publishing a novella they would have shaken their heads before delivering a hackneyed lecture about length. They would declare—with the certainty of those who monopolize the truth—that size matters: “A novella is too short for traditional publishers and too long for magazines.” Dixit. Naturally, when a sacred cow, when an industry guru makes a lapidary[1] statement, listeners curtsy to supreme intellects and go home.
Any time I hear learned concerns for the novella an old anecdote comes to mind:
In mid eighteen century, the philosopher and writer Diderot paid a visit to the Russian Court at the invitation of the empress. Diderot didn’t hide his lively atheism and was speaking freely when another guest—perhaps the mathematician Euler—leaped forward and delivered: “Monsieur, (a + b^n)/n =x, therefore God exists. Answer to that!” Diderot was flabbergasted and couldn’t find words to refute the claim, so he asked to be excused and returned to France at once. But Diderot knew his mathematics—he had written on involutes and probability. He mulled over the formula to discover it was meaningless bullshit. By then he was too far away from Saint Petersburg to do anything about it.
Truth is the novella is exceedingly difficult to write well; it demands a level of sheer technical wizardry and literary expertise as to place it beyond the abilities of most writers.
Robert Silverberg is one of the rare writers who truly understands the challenge of its format. He writes of the novella in the introduction to Sailing to Byzantium:
… 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.
But the novella isn’t simply longer than a long short story or shorter than a novel; it’s much more complex in structure, characterization and plot.
So, what’s a novella? In short, a novella is a work of prose between 20,000 and 40,000 words or 80 to160 double-spaced manuscript pages. But it’s difficult to define the precise lines between a novel, a novella, and a short story. The main difference, setting considerations of structure and difficulty aside, is length. Since there are no 5,000-word novels or 50,000-word short stories, novellas occupy the uncertain no-man’s-land in the middle.
While it’s true that some print publishers used to balk at printing novellas, the sad fact is that the format is so devilishly unforgiving with careless writers that finding a decent work was almost impossible.
A good novella demands intensity, and a language rich in leaps, cuts, and juxtaposition, while ruthlessly paring away details that do not serve the story. A novella can contain the greatest and most complex of plots, but handled with passion by compressing language and theme. Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita is ranked four in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, captured this rare quality best when he wrote, “There is… in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting-place between the imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically beautiful.”
In fact, some of the all-time greatest works of prose are novellas.
Some people shake their heads in disbelief when they learn that H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine; Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King; Antony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and Stephen King’s The mist are novellas—and the inspiration behind a few of the most successful films ever. The same people rush to check their local libraries unable to accept that towering works like John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men has 107 pages, Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, is 96-pages-long, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a tad longer at 112 pages, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; 95 pages, and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis a whooping 49 pages-long.
I could fill ten times the space afforded by this section to list Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha; Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Aleksandr Solshenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Denis Denisovich; Albert Camus’s The Stranger; Edith Warton’s Ethan Frome; Jack London’s The Call of the Wild; Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man, Gabriel García Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and many more masterful novellas which form the core of contemporary literature.
Why do we insist on stories 100,000 words-long? Why don’t we write more novellas? Because they’re damn hard to write well, much harder than a novel.
Yes but… what about length? Length matters, you know?
I don’t agree. Times have changed, and novella-length is perfect for today’s reader and perfect for the budding electronic publishing market. The online audience doesn’t always have the time or the patience to sit through a novel.
I believe that the market is ripe for good novellas. There, I said it. Perhaps the task is daunting, but there are enough writers out there with the boundless talent to take up the gauntlet and accept the challenge. Are you game?
[1] Which, as you know, means having the elegance, authority and precision associated with inscriptions on monumental stone.
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Maril Swan Friday, 27 Jul 2012 07:02 AM
Perhaps the novella needs re-branding. The word 'novella' suggests (to me) something inferior to a real novel, along the line of a Harlequin romance. If the genre could be re-invented with a different name, (here insert ideas) it may become more popular to the reading public and the publishing industry. I can visualize an entire section in Chapters/Indigo proclaiming these mini-novels or offered for a less expensive price as e-books.
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Carlos Cortes Friday, 27 Jul 2012 08:17 AM
You have a knack for putting your finger where it hurts. "Novella" has a pejorative echo; its sounds like something that didn't pass muster as a novel and was demoted. In general terms, a novella uses half the space in terms of pages and word-count than a standard novel. Consequently, it leaves little room for vagaries and for-the-hell-of-it description. Go on, I dare you, write one.
Friday, 27 Jul 2012 07:02 AM
Perhaps the novella needs re-branding. The word 'novella' suggests (to me) something inferior to a real novel, along the line of a Harlequin romance. If the genre could be re-invented with a different name, (here insert ideas) it may become more popular to the reading public and the publishing industry. I can visualize an entire section in Chapters/Indigo proclaiming these mini-novels or offered for a less expensive price as e-books.
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Friday, 27 Jul 2012 08:17 AM
You have a knack for putting your finger where it hurts. "Novella" has a pejorative echo; its sounds like something that didn't pass muster as a novel and was demoted.
In general terms, a novella uses half the space in terms of pages and word-count than a standard novel. Consequently, it leaves little room for vagaries and for-the-hell-of-it description.
Go on, I dare you, write one.
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