{"id":5951,"date":"2014-01-08T16:53:17","date_gmt":"2014-01-08T22:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/?p=5951"},"modified":"2014-01-08T16:53:17","modified_gmt":"2014-01-08T22:53:17","slug":"up-for-discussion-short-story-vs-novella-vs-novellette-vs-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/up-for-discussion-short-story-vs-novella-vs-novellette-vs-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Up for discussion: Short Story vs. Novella vs. Novellette, vs Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Books\"<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

OK, like so many of my Up For Discussion posts, this one is a bit of a rant. It came around for two reasons.<\/span><\/p>\n

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  1. \u00a0I’m not a big fan of the modern novella. I can’t really quibble with a writing format that includes Of Mice and Men<\/em>, Animal Farm<\/em> and A Christmas Carol<\/em>, 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.)<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Someone finally provided me with an obvious, technical and documented difference between the three.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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\u2014plainly wrong, even if I couldn’t say exactly why.<\/span><\/p>\n

    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\u00a0novelettes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    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<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and Hugos<\/span><\/a>), 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Behnam Mirzababazadeh Fomeshi<\/span><\/a>, from\u00a0Shiraz University<\/span><\/a>\u00a0posted an interesting slideshow titled What is a Short Story<\/span><\/a>\u00a0on academia.edu if you’re interested. But it can basically be broken down like this:<\/span><\/p>\n