Novellas are usually around 100 pages long, or between 20,000-50,000 words.
They have a long, proud history in the world of fiction, but have fallen out of favor in the past 60 years or so largely, I suspect, because of the economics of publishing, but also because we get our fix of this scale-and-scope of story in the movies.
(Think about it: a screenplay is around 120 pages)
OK, so longer than a short story or ‘novelette’ and shorter than a novel…but that can’t be the only difference, right? So what makes a novella, a novella?
Aspects Of The Novella
Well, like most movies, it largely
- follows one character and
- is limited 1-2 subplots (the way a series or a soap opera isn’t1),
- tends to be limited to 1-2 sequences of time in your character’s life,
- has a limited cast of supporting characters,
- has space for us to get to know your characters better than we would in a short story (or commercial) but less well than we would in a novel (or series).
Further Reading
I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in this form, but I did dig up some good articles on the topic from people who can credibly claim that title.
Expert articles
The Novella: Stepping stone to success or waste of time? from The WriterMag
How to Write a Novella – With Paul Michael Anderson from ReactorMag (formerly Tor.com)
Reading List – Mystery
One-Sitting Mysteries: Crime Novels Under 150 Pages – from Murder & Mayhem
The Crime Fiction Novella – from Murder & Suspense
Reading List – Horror
The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
Nothing But Blackened Teeth, Cassandra Khaw
Reading List – Science Fiction & Fantasy
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
All Systems Red, Martha Wells
The Saturn Game, Poul Anderson
This Is How You Lose The Time War, Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar
Reading List – Literary
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
Daisy Miller, Henry James
Discussion Questions
So what do you think? Is there room for this middle child of fiction? Do you want to try it? Have you? Do you like reading these kinds of very-short-novels or very-long-short-stories? Leave a comment.
- And when I say “a movie is”, obviously I mean ‘most’ and not ‘weird and wonderful arthouse experimental flicks’… ↩︎