Where does a novella end and a novel begin?
I’m reworking that long-promised fifth in the Candy’s Monsters series and this one is getting… LONG. Not 300+ pages long, but if I keep going the way I’m going it’ll hit the 200 mark or get damned close to it. Does this make it a novel? I don’t think so, but my quick check online is making me pause.
There seems to be a variety of opinions on the subject.
The Internet ALWAYS has a variety of opinions…
My personal approach is to let the story determine its own length. I know that sounds like I’m nuts, but it’s true. I’ve often started musing, pondering an idea without knowing whether it will evolve into a novel length work of fiction or if it is destined to become a short story. I write many more short stories than novels, and within the short story category they are everything from three pages to 20-something pages.
It’s been a long time since I tried my hand at the flash fiction category, but years and years ago I won a contest in Hitchcock Magazine which had a rigid, and tight, word count and not that many years ago, I collaborated with a conceptual artist (a friend) on his ‘Crime Museum’ exhibit, providing micro mini mystery stories to accompany the installations in the gallery. (One of our ideas drew the attention of the police, but that’s a story for another time… it was a CRIME story, after all.)
In my novels, I aim for 300, or just under, 300 pages, aka 80,000/82,000 words. I think this is a comfortable length for both the reader and the writer. I’ve read all too many heavily padded 300, 350, 400+ pages novels that could have lost 50, 75, or even 100 pages—had the writer trimmed them down.
C. S. Lewis famously said, “You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.” I disagree. But then, I also drink coffee!
Coffee and a novel OR novella… perfect companions.
The first story I ever completed [the precursor to Vokhtah] came in at about 200,000 words. Vokhtah itself is a comfortable 90K, while the Innerscape trilogy totals somewhere around the 200-250K mark. Within the trilogy, however, the first book is just barely novel-sized at 50-ish K. That first book simply had to be that size or it would have felt wrong, at least to me.
I’m not sure how accurate this is, but I’ve always thought that short stories were around about 5k, novellas around 25K and novels upwards of 50K. How far upwards probably depends on the genre.
As someone who adores doorstop sized scifi and fantasy books, I’m probably the wrong person to ask. 😉
I’ll admit it right here and now that I’m intimidated by the doorstop books! The length does make more sense for world-building novels than for most mysteries. I remember hearing Robert Barnard at a mystery conference saying that mysteries should be short and that other genres had other natural lengths. He was a Dickens scholar so he knew books well and was a prolific author. I still have a few of his among the paperbacks that line my bedroom walls in shelves that looks like a book lovers wallpaper. They are skinny, tightly woven tales.
Yes, I do think it’s a genre thing. That being said, I enjoyed ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and the rest of the millennial series and they were HUGE doorstoppers.
I agree that a book should be the length it needs to be. ‘Cawnpore’ is my longest book at over 95,000 words. ‘Burke in Ireland’ (to be published next year) gets just over 50,000 words. I do worry that readers might think it’s short, but it has a beginning, a middle and an (emotionally powerful and quite shocking) end. I was persuaded by editorial readers to add a short anti-climax, which is probably needed, but it was important that it was short and then we were done.
‘Cawnpore’ is set in the Indian Mutiny. As with many Indian stories, it’s a big story in every sense. There are battles and tragedy on a massive (and historically accurate) scale. The fate of an Empire hangs in the balance. (It really did – most people have no idea how close Britain came to losing India in 1857.) It needs a big book.
‘Burke in Ireland’ is about a nasty little dirty war that the British were fighting in Ireland. It centres on an actual prison break, which is exciting, but basically it’s about one man getting out of jail. It’s emotionally intense but hardly grand in its sweep. 50,000 words is enough.
There is a lot of commercial pressure to write to a format. All Mills and Boone books, for example, have (or used to have) the same pagination. But I imagine that most of the writers reading this are not aiming to write for Mills and Boone. Write the length that works for your story.
Yes the commercial pressure is real! It’s about categories and how to market something. I’m glad to hear that you’re in the “story determines its own length” camp. I think there should be more of us. Many years ago, I did an experiment with a hefty paperback mystery written by a popular author. About halfway through the book, I only read the right hand side of the page. Yes… it was a devious experiment! The results? I was ahead of the detective solving the mystery and less bored (although not free of the boredom) induced by the padding. Much of padding came in the form of repetitive descriptions and obvious conclusions in no need of being stated. It’s been years since did that. But I remember pushing myself to the end to make sure I’d solved the mystery.
If 50,000 words is the right length… than it IS the right length. When I reach the end of this draft of the fifth Candy’s Monster, I’ll decide whether to call it a novella or a short novel, but in the meantime, I’ll just figure out how to get the story written.