Today
I shall grump a bit about the peculiar problems of length in stories, and where
they lead, and see if I can straighten you all out, or provoke you into writing
me notes to straighten me out.
Fiction
simulates reality in part by
balancing doing against being, the question of "and then what
happened?" pulling the reader forward while the question "and what
was it like?" makes it real enough to be worth thinking about.
Stories
are written to be read sequentially (although in a bit of my marketing research
I discovered that surprising numbers of people don't read stories sequentially;
my public piece about that was in the late,
lamented-and-or-gloated-over-by-dozens-worldwide HelixSF, now available in a much revised version). To keep the reader reading
sequentially, there needs to be a promise/threat of something interesting that
will happen soon but not now; for the promise or threat to be something that
happens, someone has to do something, but for it to be interesting, someone has
to be something.
The
missing person must turn up (dead or alive) but for us to care, the person
looking needs to be (for example) a tough type with a soft heart, or physically
weak but immensely brave, or something.
The laboratory-created monster must turn on its tormentor (next chapter)
but for it to be interesting, the monster or the tormentor have to be something
more than caricatures. Without any
"do" there's no reason to turn the page and without any
"be" there's no reason to care, and if either is missing, the book
ends up on the toilet tank as a progressively ignored ghost of an experience.
That
do/be balance is trickiest at intermediate lengths, I think, and simplest at
long and short.
If
the story is much shorter than about 3000 words, the balance will probably
collapse between being and doing completely, tipping over into pure doing so
that the story will end up as a short-short (i.e. all plot and hardly any
people, as in many terrific stories by Roald Dahl, Saki, or Frederic Brown) or
into pure being, becoming a vignette (now called flash fiction by people who
think fiction was invented in an internet workshop somewhere) like "A
Clean Well-Lighted Place" or John Updike's "A&P."
Up
above three thousand words or so, a short story is a kind of a plotted
prose-poem – that thing Edgar Allen Poe called the single effect to be achieved
at one sitting -- and is the
shortest form in which that do/be balance can easily have something substantial
on both sides of the scale. Very often that single effect is a shock of
recognition, and because there's not much space to depict shifts and changes in
them, characters are much more usually do-ers than be-ers, but at that length,
reader interest usually requires a fair bit of being, as well as doing, even if
only a small number of characters get to really be and only one action gets
really done.
Now,
officially, on awards ballots and that sort of thing, a short story is a story
less than 7500 words (some awards also say longer than 2000 or 2500) and that's
about the least
productive definition possible. (Actually, I can think of an even less
productive definition: since the English language is about 12.7% the letter e,
and printer's words are defined as 6 characters, 7500 words X 6 characters X
12.7%=5715. "A short story in
English is a story in which the letter e occurs no more than 5715 times." There. Feel
free to send suggestions about even less productive definitions) What should define the short story is
"one big do and one big be" at a length you can consume at one
sitting (which depends, I suppose, on your reading speed and butt
strength). A short story does not
become something else when the writer cuts five words out of 2502, or adds a six word character
description to a 7497 word story, except for awards purposes.
At
the opposite pole, a novel, whether it's a tight little French zoom-wham, or a
great whacking Russian landscape,
is to some extent about what it is like to live through a given time as
a given person; it's about being, whether it wants to be or not, because you're
going to spend a while there. But
since hardly anybody wants to "just be" on each page, separate from
all other pages, 250 or so
separate times over and over, the "and then what" and "what did
he do then" and "what did she find out" things come into play,
and there has to be at least some doing; otherwise it might as well be a book
of quotations, or a series of 250 vignettes and short-shorts about 250
different people with the same name.
(Note to new writers: don't do that. Just don't. As
I say to children who are about to do something insanely dangerous with a cry of "Watch this!", I will
believe that you can without your showing me.).
And
in between there are the other lengths, and those are where that do/be problem
really gets interesting.
Novelettes,
in the 19th century popular press where the word was popularized, were
originally "good parts versions" of adventure stories – all the
action scenes (action broadly defined – not just explosions and fights, but
also kisses, quarrels, revelations, oaths, all that other stuff that is
memorable in a book) with just enough narrative summary between so that the
reader could follow the story – lots of do and minimal be. You could call them self-abridgements
of never-finished novels, and because they were a way to present blood and
thunder in a small package, oriented as much toward pure entertainment as any
form ever has been, a stain of disreputability used to cling to the term. Nowadays novelette is
the magazine-publishing term for short stories with a little more description
and one or two secondary plots.
So
the purposes of a novelette are either to enrich a short story with some
secondary plot or added scenes, or, harking back to its origin, to deliver high
adventure at high speed. Either
way it's a very "do" form: the do-do-do (and a bit of extra be for
balance) is what makes it a novelette.
Then
a few decades ago the pulp magazines found it convenient to sort stories by
length, for reader convenience and to enable a quick rough cast-off (estimate
of the number of pages of copy needed for an issue). In the full-size pulps (7 x 10 x 1/2") of the 1920-40
era, there were about 625 words to a page after ads and illos were taken into
account, so a short story was 4-12 pages, or up to 1/10 of a standard 128 page issue. A novelette was between a tenth and a
quarter of an issue, and novellas ranged from a quarter to about half an
issue.
You
will note that the last full sized pulps expired the year I was born, so you
may ask what their space constraints ought to have to do with our literary
culture today.
There
was a flurry of awards-founding in the early 1950s, and the awards ballots slightly adjusted arbitary length divisions by basing
them on word counts, but that's where they came from and mostly that's where
they remain.
I
would hope it is obvious that some novelettes manage to do novelette things in
less than 7500 words, and some might take more than 17,500, perhaps as much as
30,000 words to achieve a novelette-ish purpose. Nowadays, thanks to the emphasis on word count, there are
actually otherwise sober, normal-seeming writers who will take out or add 200
words so as to be on the right side of 17,500 words, depending on whether they
think novelettes or novellas are "more in demand" or
"hotter" or "more award-noticed" this year. (That maneuver reminds me of nothing so
much as the legendary farmer who discovered, on a resurvey, that his farmhouse
was actually in North Dakota by a hundred feet for so, and declared it was a
blessing because he didn't think he could take many more Minnesota winters).
Novellas,
on the other hand, were conceived as a kind of fusion between short stories and
novels; their origin is much farther up the brow. A flock of artsy-serious types in the 1880-1920 era thought
short-story single powerful effects were great but wanted to do them with
novel-like complexity. It turned
out you could do that, but it was pretty hard to sustain at the kind of length
that you find in Dickens, Thackeray, or Trollope (even Dickens couldn't – A
Christmas Carol is a novella).
Novellas
became a somewhat awkward form commercially (which only enhanced their
prestige) because they made for a too-slim volume for book buyers (who wanted
to make sure they were getting enough literature per expenditure) and too long
a piece for most magazines (whose readers wanted variety, something harder to
give them if you let one novella take up room that could be occupied by five to
seven short stories.) It's a
heavy-on-the-be form in which a dense structure of meaning is laid onto a few
interesting incidentes (sometimes only one). Think of how much The Secret Sharer, Beyond Bedlam, or The Last of the
Winnebagos
revolve around what it's like to be standing there in the moment when a
conventionally honest man makes a self-admitted killer his best friend and
confidant, when several people who are by our definitions mad come to realize
how much they prefer what we call madness to what we call sanity, or just to be
the owner/keeper of one of the world's last dogs and to have to cope with its
death. Those novellas – fine ones
all – explore how much being can be supported by a little bit of doing.
.Once
again the pulp fiction magazines appropriated the literary term and made it a
length, eventually codified in the awards ballots to 17,500-39,999 words. When fiction magazines were a major
source of cheap mass
entertainment, the label "novella" (or sometimes just "short
novel") let readers know that this story might be reserved to be read in a
long evening, a weekend afternoon, or across a couple of days' trolley rides or
lunches.
And
once again, the focus on word count leads into silliness. Realistically, for example, Conrad's The
Duel or
The Brute
are far less than novella length, but they're novellas in intent and feel; on
the other side, although The Last Unicorn, The Three Stigmata of Palmer
Eldritch,
and Double Indemnity were published as novels, everything about them says
novella.
A
few thoughts that are not quite conclusions:
As
what one out of circulation fanzine called "one of science fiction's two
leading bridesmaids" (the other is Lisa Goldstein, and they were
commenting on this sad distinction), I am probably less
involved, or at least less profitably involved, in the awards process than
anyone else. But since it doesn't
affect me – I can pretty clearly also-run at all lengths and themes – I have
what might pass for objectivity, and it seems to me that in the fiction awards,
the benefits of having an easily applied rule like length are outweighed by the
drawbacks of forcing "The Elf-knight Rescues the Spunky Princess" to
compete with "Certain Ruminations about Melville in a Lunar
Colony." The Oscars throw all
purposes in together (though they break out short forms); the Grammies
subdivide by subgenre; the Emmies and Tonys do a bit of both. Might their example be worth thinking
about? Would you need impossibly
complex juries to decide whether works were trying for noveletteish or
novellaish purposes? (And there
are other possible purposes; what about works that attempt those?)
If
you aspire to write well, you might consider where you want to be (or what you
want to do) about the do/be spectrum; not so much in the rough draft, I think,
as later on in revisions. Want a
short story? Cut to the biggest do
surrounded by the biggest be.
Novelet, lots of do with enough be for flavor. Novella, lots of be with enough do so
it's not dull. Novel, plenty of
both, well-mixed. Or something
like that.
I
think lately I haven't read enough of the old kind of novelette, the
self-condensed unwritten adventure novel.
In the same sense that I haven't had enough red wine, pie a la mode, or
rambling late night conversations, lately, i.e. it's something that isn't good
for you if it's exclusively what your life is about, but it's also something
where if you never get it you're missing something. Seems like it wouldn't be a hard thing to write, and for all
I know dozens of good writers are doing it right now. I don't keep up enough.
Is there a major contemporary master of the Old Novelette? (Not the length, mind you. The aspiration, regardless of the
length).
I
think many science fiction editors are too easily pleased with phony novellas,
i.e. plot-thin stories in which there's vast amounts of reflection and
description that are only ill-hooked to the few events. One reason phony novellas occur in such
profusion is that they are a lazy process for a smooth, craftsmanlike writer,
they make an editor feel like s/he is purveying Art, and although readers
complain due to the dull pointlessness, such readers can always be dismissed as
Philistines.
Many
times when a reader complains of inconsistency, they're complaining about a
sudden radical shift in the do/be ratio.
In real life people sometimes spend many ages just hanging out and
talking and thinking, and then abruptly see more sudden drastic action than
they will ever see again in their lives (that's kind of the point of many John
Irving novels). But in fiction a
sudden shift from bang-bang-bang do-do-do to a tranquil flow of reflective be's
throws many readers right out of the story. That's part of what makes From Here To Eternity, The
Great Gatsby,
and Butterfield 8
the masterpieces they are; they
manage to do that and make it work.
