On The Net
LENGTHWISE
by James Patrick Kelly
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In theory, every writer is in charge of their own career. Sometimes fate intervenes—for good or ill—and nudges our trajectories. Maybe after we go all fan boy on our favorite Asimov’s writer at a con, she invites us to lunch and we strike up a lifelong literary friendship. Or just after we make our first sale, the magazine folds. Or we discover that our mother’s cousin’s wife is a literary agent who agrees to represent our first novel. Or the editor who buys our trilogy leaves and suddenly the middle book is a publishing orphan. These happenstances, which are totally unpredictable, are part of the writing life.
But we writers do try to make plans and follow through on that which we can control. For example, before we begin writing a new piece, we make several key decisions. Most important is figuring out what it’s going to be about, for example the character, plot, ideas, and setting. But also crucial is estimating how long the project is going to be. Sometimes as we get deeper into a manuscript, it gets longer. Or sometimes shorter, although it rarely does for me. But in general as the first words start to flow onto the screen, we have a rough notion of how many of those words it will take to finish. This is why many aspiring writers traditionally start their careers writing short stories, because they are still learning how to gauge the size of their projects. I have sat through many writers workshops where the killer comment was “This story wants to be a novel.” Another reason to stay short is the potential for any project to fail. Easier to write off a month or so chasing a dodgy story, than a year or more of stumbling into a novel that goes nowhere.
I know what some wiser heads (Hello, Sheila and Emily!) are thinking. A story should be as long as it needs to be and it’s the editors’ job to make that final determination. But how do writers and editors know this? What needs to be in a novel that doesn’t necessarily need to be in a novelette? How is a story like a novella? And for that matter, how long should a short story be anyway?
You may be surprised to learn that there is no definitive answer, because none of us can agree what a short story or a novel is. Sure we can point to a work and say, behold a novel. Or this is clearly a short story. But these judgement calls are best based on examination of a specific text. A classic case of you’ll-know-it’s-a-short-story-when-you-read-it. If you doubt that there is no robust definition of short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels, let’s break for a quick quiz.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/43: novel or novella?
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/932: short story or novelette?
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/5200: novelette or novella?
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells gutenberg.org/ebooks/35: novella or novel?
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equations: short story or novelette?
Fire Watch by Connie Willis https://infinityplus.co.uk/stories/firewatch.htm: novelette or novella?
I’ll leave the answers by the exit, but don’t worry if you’ve misremebered the size of these classic stories. The point is that they often read larger or smaller than their actual word count.
Wait, do I see a hand raised out there? Yes, you. Go ahead, Reader!
Excuse me but there’s an easy way to tell a novelette from a novella. I just open Asimov’s to the Table of Contents and everything is clearly labeled.
Ah, therein hangs a tale.
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our awards
The Hugos https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/a-short-history-of-the-hugo-awards-process/, first and still the most prestigious of all our genre’s awards, were initially given in 1953. In that year there was only one fiction category, the novel, won by Alfred Bester’s https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/bester_alfred The Demolished Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demolished_Man (highly recommended!). There were no Hugos in 1954, but in 1955 three fiction categories showed up on the final ballot: novel, novelette, and short story. However, as time passed, fiction categories came and went and the voting rules were—shall we say—fluid. One year saw no fiction awards and for several there were only two: novel and short fiction, lumping together short story, novelette, and novella. But in 1965, Damon Knight https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/knight_damon, founded the Science Fiction Writers of America https://www.sfwa.org and a year later the members of SFWA voted the very first Nebula Awards decreeing word count cutoffs for each category. Here are the current Nebula Rules https://nebulas.sfwa.org/about-the-nebulas/nebula-rules:
Nebula Awards® will be made in the following categories:
Short Story: less than 7,500 words;
Novelette: at least 7,500 words but less than 17,500 words;
Novella: at least 17,500 words but less than 40,000 words
Novel: 40,000 words or more.
Two years after that first Nebula ceremony, the Hugos fell into step, acknowledging the categories of novel, novella, novelette, and short story and it has been thus ever since. Even though there is still no robust definition of these categories, browsing the internet in 2024 reveals that many commenters point to the SFWA word count definitions as important, if not definitive. But the question is by no means settled. By the reckoning of the committee of the World Fantasy Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Fantasy_Award, a novel is more than forty thousand words, a novella is between 40,000 and 10,000 words and a short story is everything under ten thousand. Meanwhile the Mystery Writers of America https://mysterywriters.org recognize only two categories with their Edgar Awards https://edgarawards.com: hardbound novel (no word count) and short stories of between 1,000-22,000. And according to the Master Class online teaching platform https://www.masterclass.com/articles/word-count-guide “While anything over forty thousand words can fall into the novel category, fifty thousand is considered the minimum novel length.” It maintains that novellas are between ten thousand and forty thousand and blithely suggests “The average short story should run anywhere from five thousand to ten thousand words, but they can be anything above one thousand words. Flash fiction is a short story that is five hundred words or less.” So you see that our formulation of the four fiction categories is open to debate since they are based on reasonable, but nonetheless arbitrary cutoffs.
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word count esoterica
Damon Knight was one of my mentors and, as I type this, I wish I could ask this Grand Master, founder of SFWA and the Milford and Clarion Writers Workshops and one of the most astute and merciless critics in the history of our genre, whether a 40,001 word story is a novella or a novel. I think he would chuckle and say, That’s your problem, Jim. For the last couple of decades it has been, since I serve on the SFWA Awards Rules Committee (SARC) https://www.sfwa.org/what-is-sfwa/committees, which adjudicates disputes about eligibility with regard to publication date and story length.
For many years word counts were the Committee’s constant headache. In the days of typewriters with their monospaced Courier fonts https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2059 before computers were the solution to all problems, rough estimates were that around 250 words would fit on a manuscript page. Multiply by the number of pages and you have the count. We might calculate more precisely by hand counting the number of words on three or five or ten lines, taking the average word per line, then counting the number of lines per page and multiplying that by the number of pages. Whew!
But even this procedure was woefully inaccurate. In the early days of computers many different word count programs, some based on word processors, others on free websites, came to the rescue. Of course, the most important reason story writers count words was and is because we get paid by the word. Yet even with algorithm-based word counting, there could still be variation between the number of words writers claimed to have written and number on the check editors cut. Which is why writers would occasionally petition the Rules Committee to declare their work a short story even though it appeared miscounted as a novelette on a magazine’s ToC or to bump their long novelette into the novella category.
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the art of the short
Acknowledging that the Nebula cutoffs are crude instruments with which to label artistic expression, the question remains whether there are distinctive qualities to different story lengths. Or is it all just short fiction until some publisher slaps covers on a story and calls it a novel? As it turns out, the debate is ongoing. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_story tells us that “A short story is a piece of prose fiction that can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood.” But then it seems to contradict itself, “Short stories have no set length. In terms of word count, there is no official demarcation between an anecdote, a short story, and a novel.” I like what Blurb has to say about novellas https://www.blurb.com/blog/what-is-a-novella. “In terms of structure, a novella features more conflicts and plot development than a short story, but fewer subplots than a novel. Even though novellas may follow a traditional story arc and create the same kind of unifying effect that short stories are known for, they often lack the complexity and multiple perspectives found in novels.” I was chagrined at the online reputation of the novelette, where I believe I have done much of my best work. Many would-be experts incorporate the novelette into the novella or dismiss it as a kind of literary middle child. According to the Collins English Dictionary https://www.collinsdictionary.com/jp/dictionary/english/novelette the term was coined around 1850 and refers to a “short novel, sometimes, specifically one regarded as inferior in quality, banal, overly commercial, etc.” Book Bird https://bookbird.io/short-fiction treats it as an anomaly “A rare type of short fiction that develops a fully complete story around a single central conflict.”
Rare? As I write in the Fall of 2023, twenty-two novelettes have appeared in these pages in the year to date.
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exit
Here are your answers: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde = novelette; The Fall of the House of Usher = novelette; The Time Machine = novella; The Metamorphosis = novelette; The Cold Equations = novelette; Fire Watch = novelette.
How did you do?
Copyright © 2024 James Patrick Kelly