What is the difference between a Novel, Novella and short story?
Is there a word limit, page limit or is not a true convention - just whatever something looks like?
Length. It’s somewhat arbitrary, but in science fiction:
<7500 words is a short story.
7500-17,500 is a novelette.
17,500-40,000 is a novella
40,000 plus is a novel, though most novels these days are at least 70,000 words.
The Village Voice had an article about this a few years ago: Tracking the Novella Trend: Slim-Fast Fiction by David Bowman
Henry James called these narrations nouvelles—works of fiction longer than short stories but shorter than novels. The French term was soon Americanized to "novella."
But I think that the French term “nouvelle” means “short stories” AND novella. I don’t think that there are 2 separate words for “short stories” and “novella” in French. But I could be mistaken. Please correct me if it’s the case!
My French is admittedly not perfect, but I believe that you are correct.
The French term for “story” is “conte.” “Nouvelles” means “news” in French. Also, the French word for “novel” is “roman.”
I think James coined the term himself, using a French word to describe an English form (my library hasn’t paid it’s OED bill, so I can’t look it up right now).
But surely the definition has more to it than merely length. A novel and a short story are distinguished by more than length, for example, a novel requires character development but a short story does not.
Are there some literary differences other than just length among these forms?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by RealityChuck *
**The French term for “story” is “conte.” “Nouvelles” means “news” in French. Also, the French word for “novel” is “roman.”
Hi RealityChuck
Yes, nouvelles mean news in French, but ALSO a short story. And “conte” means, in English, “fairy tale”. Story = histoire. :)
A novel (or novella which only really differs from a novel in length) is a complete story. Regardless on structure (whether or not it runs consistantly from beginning to end, has different narrative methods etc) it has to function as a whole; offer questions/a dilemma, explore these within the text, and then give climax/resolution.
The literary Short Story as a formal genre is supposed to function as more of a ‘snapshot’ or sketch, rather than the complete picture. It does not have to answer the questions it raises, and can function more as an allegory than an actual story. The reader is left to do more of the work - characters are not always fully realised, situations won’t always find resolution. The formal genre of ‘Short Story’ is self-conscious, a fairly structured and formal way of writing second only to Poetry. As a Short Story writer you are supposed to ‘show, not tell’ i.e use ‘Telling detail’ in order to further describe your characters/what is happening to them. For example, from Bad News* by Margaret Atwood, the first line -
Who would have red geranuims? Who has a terrace? It’s a lazy image, fairly middle-class, complacent in that someone has the time to sit and watch geraniums in the sun - and later on, the narrative voice dreams of running over the geraniums in a tank, and in doing so turns this middle-class idyll into some stultifying prison which is resented. The first line takes on board the work that a paragraph would have the time to accomplish in a novel. Short Stories allow the reader to take an active role in the creation of the story within the text, as you have to read between the lines, discover further meaning, think about what you are reading further than the words on the page; and as the reader, the decisions you make will directly effect your reading of the story, the meaning you derive from it. A novel/novella lays it out for you to enjoy and functions as a more passive reading experience.
*‘Bad News’ from Good Bones, Margaret Atwood, 1992.
I’m a huge fan of the short story. I’ve heard it defined as something that can be read in a single sitting. Arbitrary, but…
I think the short story is probably the most difficult of the writing forms, in that your choice of words has to be more succinct and your style more efficient. You don’t have 300 pages to develop a thought.
I receive the “Greatest American Short Stories” every year for Christmas. The forward of these books often tries to define the short story. You might want to pick up a copy or two and see what the editors say.