For no other reason than “I feel like it,” I’m declaring March “Novella Month” here on the blog. As far as I can tell, there is no month-long celebration of what has become for me, and many of the readers I know, my favorite length for fiction. Among the writers I know and whose work I love, a good many excel and revel in the novella realm. My goal for the month is to simply celebrate the form with book reviews, quotes from other readers, and hopefully some guest-posts by or interviews with novella writers, editors, or publishers, regardless of genre. I’ll use the hashtag #NovellaMonth when I post on social media.
So What Is a Novella?
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) define novellas as ranging from 17,500 to 40,000 words, and most other genre fiction awards/organizations appear to agree: the Hugo Awards, the Romance Writers of America RITA Awards, British Fantasy Awards, Paris Literary Prize, the Nero Wolfe Society’s Black Orchid Award, and the Shirley Jackson Awards to name a few alongside SFWA’s Nebula Awards. (The Horror Writers Association’s Stoker Awards lump novellas and novelettes into a “Best Long Fiction” category.) Even sites that simply discuss the definition of novella quote or refer to the SFWA definition. Some blogs stretch the upper limit to 50,000 words, but none of the major recognized awards seem to. In terms of page length, if the average single-spaced page has approximately 500 words, novellas would range from 35 to 80 or 100 pages.
Per a few conversations with fellow writers, stories in the 150-200 page range tend to be described as “short novels” (for instance, C.S.E. Cooney’s wonderful The Twice-Drowned Saint, recently re-released by Mythic Delirium Books). In my mind even 150-180 page length work fits under the novella umbrella – but I’m not the one creating literature awards season criteria, so take that for what it’s worth. (Also, please don’t come at me with “that’s not a novella!” if I review or talk about books that are less than 50 pages or more than 100 under the #NovellaMonth tag. It’s not a hill worth fighting over, I promise.)
What Is It About Novellas, anyway?
For me, the joy of novellas is that they can be the same type of quick reads as short stories (depending on my mood, other distractions/chores, etc.) but with the world-building and characterizational depth of novels. Robert Silverberg, whose long out-or-print collection To Open The Sky is one of my most-often re-read books, composed of 5 linked novellas originally published in Galaxy magazine, said it more eloquently, in the introduction to his collection Sailing to Byzantium: “[The novella] is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms...it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book. Thus it provides an intense, detailed exploration of its subject, providing to some degree both the concentrated focus of the short story and the broad scope of the novel.”
I’m pretty sure I loved the form before I consciously knew what it was, even having read To Open the Sky for the first time sometime in 5th or 6th grade, although I readily admit that the novellas we were assigned to read in high school didn’t work for me – another quick internet search shows that English Class favorites like The Old Man and The Sea (26,601 words), Of Mice and Men (29,160) and Ethan Frome (34,500) all fall into that definition of novella up above. I struggled with all of them in high school (with apologies to Eugenia DelCampo and the other wonderful English teachers I had), probably due less to quality than to the fact that I have never liked being told what I had to read. I’ve never attempted to read those books again. Perhaps I should give them a second chance. On the other hand, one of my most-reread classics is A Christmas Carol, which clocks in at 28,500, and I also loved The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (25,500), both of which were assigned/recommended by my high school English teachers.
I had no idea that these books were anything other than really short novels – until I read Stephen King’s collection Different Seasons, sometime in 1982 or ’83, in which’s Afterword he discussed how hard it was to get stories of this length published, being too long for the short story magazines and too short for book publishers. That has shifted a lot in the last ten years as many small press publishers, and even some of the bigger houses, are more than happy to publish novellas as stand-alone books rather than in collections. (I’m planning to run a list of such publishers, with a focus on the small presses, sometime this month.)
To Novella or Not Novella?
As a writer, all my published work has been in the short story realm, perhaps bordering into novelette. I’ve started two different novellas over the years, but they’re both incomplete. I haven’t been writing much fiction at all since at least 2018, but I’m thinking I might motivate myself to revisit one of those projects this month.
A small selection of the novellas I’ll be reading or reviewing this month (the bottom half of the pile have already been read)
So, reader friends – what do you love about the novella form? What are your favorite novellas? Please weigh in in the comments. Maybe you’ll introduce me to something new – or maybe you’ll convince me to re-read one of those classics I struggled with in high school!
