Novella Workshop: What’s a Novella?

I think a lot of people understand that a novella isn’t a novel, but they're not sure if it has to do with subject matter: is a novella a “light” version of a more-serious topic? Is it a romance?), for instance. Some have only seen novellas in collection, and wonder if to be considered a novella, it has to be short fiction on a theme (this is especially evident in Christian novella collections right now as in Christmas novella collections.)

 

Actually, though novellas have some characteristics that set them apart from both longer and shorter works, they are most properly defined by their length by comparison to other fiction.

 

Flash fiction is a relatively new genre, and is quite popular right now. Stories are from around 50 to 1000 words. Usually they are punchy or evocative or startling, and aim to make a single memorable impression.

 

A short story is almost always between 3500 and 7,500 words (though stories between 1000 and 3500 words are too long for flash fiction, and thus would be consider short-short stories.) Since short stories are rarely published as stand-alone works, and magazines where they appear in print have physical parameters, the 7,500 count is a hefty one and means that an editor would have to really, really like it to edge out a couple of shorter works by two other writers. Of course digital journals and blogs wouldn’t have those parameters and can accommodate longer stories. Something to consider: Multiple studies have shown that most online readers’ attention span is diminishing. (You can test yours here.)

 

Novelettes are a genre of the past, rarely seen in today’s fiction. They’re between 7,500 and 17,000. Never read one? Me neither.

 

Novellas are between 17,000 words and 40,000 words. That upper end is where things start getting blurry, because standard novel length is begins at 40,000 words. And as War and Peace (587,000), Les Miserables (655,000) and Atlas Shrugged (645,000) show, there’s no upper limit.

 

Which other authors do you read or know about who are writing novellas today?