What do you call a short story, a novella, or a novel?
I had an interesting discussion some time back with another self-publisher. Not a fiction author, to the best of my knowledge; he was writing cookbooks, but that doesn’t really change anything. I told him I had written nine novellas, and that I liked the form quite a bit. He said, “Yeah, that eighty-to-one-hundred-thousand-word range, that’s nice because you have enough room to expand on an idea, but you’re not writing a full-length novel.” It turned out that he felt anything under 80,000 words is a short story.
Now, I admit that a couple of my novellas are shortish, because I tend to write short, period, but the shortest one of the bunch comes to over thirty pages, and that’s a pretty long short story, while the longest is only about eighty pages, certainly not a novel. That’s why I publish them in books of four.
So here are my questions:
- What are the break-points?
- What’s a short story?
- What’s a novella?
- Is the term “novelette” as ugly to you as it is to me, and if you use it, what does it mean?
- How short can a novel be?
- How long can a novel be?
I know, there are a bunch of places online that have lists of such terms, and I was going to list some links here, but I decided to let you do your own research, or post your answers based on what you believe now with no additional research. Please do, however, feel free to support your beliefs with evidence and sources.
These days, 500 and 1000 words are considered flash. Anything between there and around 5K tends to be called a short story. It can sometimes go as high as 8 or 12K, but that’s increasingly rare. Anything from 13K up is a novella until you hit 40-50K (YA novel) or 60-70K (adult novel, albeit shortish).*
*Disclaimer: the above is my personal understanding, YMMV.
The word “novelette” strikes me the same way 6 heaping teaspoons of sugar in a cup of coffee does. Ugh.
Thank you for your comment! I tend to think the same way, actually.
No one has anything to say about an upper limit? Like maybe “Anything over 900,000 words and you get summarily executed!”