Monthly Archives: January 2014

Up for discussion: Short Story vs. Novella vs. Novellette, vs Novel

3 Replies

Books

OK, like so many of my Up For Discussion posts, this one is a bit of a rant. It came around for two reasons.

  1.  I’m not a big fan of the modern novella. I can’t really quibble with a writing format that includes Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm and A Christmas Carol, but I’ve yet to find many modern equivalents that compare. Especially with recent authors’ tendency to end on cliffhangers and serialise. (I could write a rant on that alone.)
  2. Someone finally provided me with an obvious, technical and documented difference between the three.

I may have known the following during my Freshman Creative Writing course, but I’d fully forgotten. So, while I have been consistently annoyed at all the 20 page novellas hitting my review request box or the Amazon free list, I couldn’t quite pinpoint what I was disliking so very, very much about them. In my mind they were wrong—plainly wrong, even if I couldn’t say exactly why.

For simple shelving purposes, I generally considered anything more than 100 pages a novel and anything less a short story, but I had a vague notion that there were more detailed classifications and that surely some of the ridiculously short stories I was encountering couldn’t be novellas or even novelettes. 

Well, thanks to Goodreads member Serendi, who had the forethought of checking some of the better known literary award rules (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and Hugos), I decided to do a little digging too and found a basic consensus. While there is no official, universally accepted, numerical definition of the difference between short stories, novellas, novelettes, and novels there does seem to be a fairly firm consensus in the literary world.

, from Shiraz University posted an interesting slideshow titled What is a Short Story on academia.edu if you’re interested. But it can basically be broken down like this:

  • Novel, over ~40,000 words
  • Novella, ~17,500 to ~40,000 words
  • Novelette, ~7,500 to ~17,500 words
  • Short story, under ~7,500 words.
  • Flash Fiction, under ~1,000

Taking your average 250 words to the page, that comes to approximately 160 for a novel, 70-159 for a novella, 30-69 for a novelette, and everything below that as a short story (or flash fiction if it’s really short). Again, there is some flex in there; Carsson-Newman College for example, would set the limit between novel and novella at 50,000 instead of 40,000. But I found more similarities than differences as I searched.

My point is that there are fairly set parameters. There are generally accepted definitions to these terms. Authors SHOULD NOT be arbitrarily naming their pieces of work a novella or novelette when it is patently a short story. It’s cheap. It’s cheating. It comes across as a blatant attempt to give your work more gravitas than it deserves.

Now, I’m not trying to disparage short stories. It takes a lot of talent to squeeze a plot and meaningfulness into ~7,500 words. Some might argue that it’s harder. So there’s no shame in being a short story writer. Sure, you can’t call yourself a “novelist,” and that does have such a nice ring to it. It feels heady and heavy. While short storyist doesn’t quite feel the same. But heck, my own book is roughly 250 pages long and I still don’t know if I’d have the balls to call myself a novelist!

I’m just gonna cut loose and be a little snippy here, because what I think when a 15 page ‘novella’ hits my review request list (or I encounter it elsewhere) is that the author is either a faker who wants his/her work to seem more important than it is or doesn’t know the basics of their own art. Neither reflects well on the author.

I don’t write short stories. I don’t write novellas. I’ve never written a novelette or tried my hand at flash fiction. The stories in my head flow for pages and pages and pages. But I look at a 10 page ‘novella’ and sneer. Is this really the response anyone could be seeking from your readers? So I would really, really appreciate it if authors took the time to ensure they labeled their less-than-novel-length writing appropriately. 

Rant over.

Book Review of Susan Ee’s Angelfall

Leave a reply

Angelfall

I picked up a copy go Susan Ee‘s YA novel, Angelfall from the KDP free list.

Description from Goodreads:
It’s been six weeks since angels of the apocalypse descended to demolish the modern world. Street gangs rule the day while fear and superstition rule the night. When warrior angels fly away with a helpless little girl, her seventeen-year-old sister Penryn will do anything to get her back.

Anything, including making a deal with an enemy angel.

Raffe is a warrior who lies broken and wingless on the street. After eons of fighting his own battles, he finds himself being rescued from a desperate situation by a half-starved teenage girl.

Traveling through a dark and twisted Northern California, they have only each other to rely on for survival. Together, they journey toward the angels’ stronghold in San Francisco where she’ll risk everything to rescue her sister and he’ll put himself at the mercy of his greatest enemies for the chance to be made whole again.

Review:
I thought that this was a pretty good read. There were some really great parts. Such as the paranoid schizophrenic mother who forced her daughter to take numerous self-defence classes, in case the daughter should ever need to defend herself from HER. That does something moving to my insides. I also liked Penryn and Raffie, as well as Obi and his crew.

I did occasionally wonder where all the normal people were. I mean there had to be a few non-homicidal or non-victimised people out there. There just had to be. But Penryn only seemed to meet up with potential murders or completely broken people. That didn’t feel particularly realistic to me. Sure there’d obviously be some, even a lot, but EVERYONE?

That’s a small quibble though. I only have two real complaints. One is that the whole thing had a bit of a ‘we did this, then I did this, and then this happened’ feel to it. This is often hard to avoid with any first person, present tense narrative, but I REALLY felt it here. What’s more, it felt very much like we were JUST getting an accounting of what Penryn was doing, without feeling like it was also leading up to anything. It felt like it just so happened that this minute to minute accounting of her life occurred in the midst of a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, as opposed to this future angelic war zone and her contributions to it being pivotal to it in any way. Interesting, but unimportant to the whole. I’m not saying that was the case, just that it felt that way.

The second is that the question of WHY is never addressed. It’s a bit like reading a novel set during D-Day without anyone knowing or telling the reader what World War II was about or why June 6th, 1944 was important. This lack of understanding stole a bit of the gravity from the story.

On the whole, however, I read it in a day and enjoyed it. I’d even be interested in picking up the sequel at some point.

Killing Matt Cooper

Book Review of Killing Matt Cooper, by John Cassian

1 Reply

Killing Matt CooperAuthor, John Cassian, sent me a copy of his novella, Killing Matt Cooper.

Description from Goodreads:
A FEMA crisis manager by day and serial killer by night becomes romantically involved with the FBI unit chief hunting him down. Will she learn his dark secret? If you’re a fan of “American Psycho” or “Darkly Dreaming Dexter,” this is the book for you!

Review:
I have to admit that I didn’t have high hopes for this one, going in. I had it in my head that it was going to be some base attempt to pass sexual amoralism off as excusable fetish play. And therefore declare itself admirably open minded and liberal…(read liberated) in the process. I mean, the Amazon page comes with this warning: “*GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING!* *ABDUCTION, NON-CONSENSUAL, SNUFF* *This is a work of fiction meant for MATURE, 18+ AUDIENCES ONLY!*”

I was wrong. It wasn’t nauseatingly permissive, like I expected. There is some real depth here. But it took me a little while to figure that out. ‘Cause, in the beginning, the book did a good job of setting itself up as just such a piece of shallow exploration of sexual escapism and male entitlement.

The whole first 15% is taken up entirely by an extended, first person (from the POV of the aggressor) account of a rape and then a brief murder. At the time I found this horribly distasteful and thought, ‘yep there it is. This guy is really gonna try to play this off as OK, isn’t he?’ I was discomfited not by the eventual murder, but because, in the end, the woman was supposed to have enjoyed being dominated and raped. God I hate that trope! I really really do. 

Honestly, I almost didn’t make it. At about 13%, and having gotten nothing more than an unusually long (for such a short book) and uncomfortable rape scene, I almost gave up. I essentially said to myself, ‘if this is just some literarily handed ‘sick fuck’ living out his rape fantasies I’m not interested. I’m out!’ But I figured in all fairness I should at least make it into the meat of the book before abandoning it…giving it the benefit of the doubt, of course, that there would eventually be meat. There is. 

I’m thrilled I did. ‘Cause Samuel Knight has a great voice! He’s mocking and self-deprecating, delusional and poignantly self-aware. Sometimes, it’s not possible to tell which is which and that makes him eminently relatable in that respect. Oh…and he’s sick as shit. (So not wholly relatable, after all.) He’s seriously twisted in the head, totally crackerjacks, and not in a harmless, stupid-happy kind of way, but in a dangerous, remorseless psycho-killer kind of way. The thing is, you still kind of like him. Hell, you do like him; you just tell yourself that you shouldn’t, ’cause, you know, he’s nutzo.

The upside of that agonising first scene (and I’m sorry to keep harping on about it, but it was a bit like riding shotgun with Anthony Sowell for a little while there) is that the reader is painfully aware of what Samuel is doing while he goes about his normal sexual-predator-routine, without the author ever having to do anymore than drop a euphemism. It wasn’t until later in the book that I was able to appreciate the purpose of dropping such a detailed event so early on. Plus, the book does have a great opening line. 

There are also some real situational gems. I wish I could relate them all, but they would be spoilers and in such a short piece it wouldn’t take much to ruin if for others. I’ll just say, for those who have read it, Samuel’s postcoital thoughts on his facial expression was my favourite. (There, I think that’s clear enough to identify and vague enough to not give anything away.)

I don’t know if this is the first of a series. There are certainly threads left open…Matt Cooper for one. But the story still has a complete feel to it. After a rough start…which, no doubt, was intended to be just so…I ended up really liking it. I liked the character’s internal dialogue, his attempt to find human closeness, his willingness to accept his own ugliness and welcome his eventual just rewards. I may have hated his actions, but I liked HIM. The thing is that they really shouldn’t be separable.