Short Novel
Dec. 23rd, 2004 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Short Novel
The short novel is the form of some of our finest fiction. Its length varies greatly, from what some would call long short stories to what others would think of as novels. Kafka's "Metamorphiosis" and Voltaire's Candide both appear in anthologies of short novels. From 15,000 to 50,000 words seem to be outside limits.
Writers like D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Katherine Anne Porter found that the short novel gave them space to develop satisfying complexity within a scale that lent itself to an artful shaping of the work. You can deal with a bigger piece of time, more characters, and more scenes, as in Henry James's Daisy Miller or Toni Morrison's Sula. Yet at the same time, the short novel doesn't get baggy and long-winded as fat novels often do. There's no place readers can skip and skim.
But the short novel remains a problematical form, difficult to classify, and, worst of all from your point of view, extremely difficult to market. Magazines don't want them because they're too long. Book publishers don't want them because they're too short. Lately, as Saul Bellow and Jane Smiley have shown, shorter novels have been gaining in popularity, sometimes as leadoffs for short-story collections and sometimes as separate publications (Philip Roth provides examples of both).
See Novel, Short Story, Structure.
Short Novel
The short novel is the form of some of our finest fiction. Its length varies greatly, from what some would call long short stories to what others would think of as novels. Kafka's "Metamorphiosis" and Voltaire's Candide both appear in anthologies of short novels. From 15,000 to 50,000 words seem to be outside limits.
Writers like D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Katherine Anne Porter found that the short novel gave them space to develop satisfying complexity within a scale that lent itself to an artful shaping of the work. You can deal with a bigger piece of time, more characters, and more scenes, as in Henry James's Daisy Miller or Toni Morrison's Sula. Yet at the same time, the short novel doesn't get baggy and long-winded as fat novels often do. There's no place readers can skip and skim.
But the short novel remains a problematical form, difficult to classify, and, worst of all from your point of view, extremely difficult to market. Magazines don't want them because they're too long. Book publishers don't want them because they're too short. Lately, as Saul Bellow and Jane Smiley have shown, shorter novels have been gaining in popularity, sometimes as leadoffs for short-story collections and sometimes as separate publications (Philip Roth provides examples of both).
See Novel, Short Story, Structure.