Short story, novella, or novel?
Readers don’t worry too much about this question, except when an author tries to scam them with a “novel” that’s 10 kwords (the other extreme is possible too: I’ve become annoyed when I want to just read a nice short story, and it turns out to be a 30-40 kword novella). Readers only want to read a good story, period. Maybe they worry more about genre than plot (genres nowadays are just key words to describe a plot) and have reasonable criteria—for example, no porn and in English (I’ll read a story in French or Spanish, but many people wouldn’t).
Authors have to worry about two aspects of this question: First, should you set out to write one particular form? Second, no matter how you arrive at the finished product, how does the form change your attended audience? Compared to more important writing challenges like plot, characterization, dialogue, settings, flashbacks v. back story, first or third person, point of view, and so forth, these two questions are less important, but the final form might reflect on how you handle those writing challenges.
My last comment is an argument for determining the form before you start on your writing journey. In fact, there are situations where doing that is an absolute constraint. If an ezine or traditional magazine requires a short story between 3 and 5 kwords, you have to be within those limits; you can’t even send a short story of 8 kwords! That might imply cutting back on dialogue and characterization, for example—that kind of brief short story has few characters and those few aren’t going to be talking a lot. There’s something to be said for this kind of constrained writing because it teaches you to be a minimalist writer. That means you have to learn not to be a verbose storyteller and to let readers participate in the creative process by, for example, giving them only enough hints about characters to develop their own mental images and behavioral perceptions.
Beyond the discipline you might learn from constraining your writing to one form, though, I’d vote for deciding on the form as you spin your yarn. That allows more creativity. Because you can do content editing as you go, you might decide in midstream that your characters are really interesting and deserve a larger stage, both time- and space-wise (when you’re “in the groove,” they might actually be clamoring for this). Plot twists and new settings might pop into your mind (or their minds?) as you go. Content editing might be needed so you can go back and link everything together to have a logical flow. Many unforeseen things can occur when writing a story, so deciding at the beginning that it will be one of those three forms can be an irksome tying of one’s hands!
Of course, you can finish a short story and “publish” it (I often give them away—novellas too), and go back to it sometime later and make it into a novella or novel, making that short fiction a part of the larger work. That magazine’s constraint has little permanence—you usually still own the copyright, after all, and can even include the short story in a collection, sometimes with a required wait period. The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan is an example of that process of expanding a short story into a novella or novel . One of the themes in the novel, originating from a more personal what-if I prefer not to get into, was combined with several others to create a government-conspiracy-type thriller novel a bit like but more complex than the movie Reds (the main character is a woman in the novel, making it one thriller movie Bruce Willis won’t appear in!). In other words, that content editing you do can span several works!
There’s no doubt the form changes your audience. I probably read about the same number of short stories as novellas and novels, which means I spend more time reading the latter, of course. With speed reading, I can polish off a novella or novel in a weekend, so the attraction of a short story being short isn’t so important to me (except at a doctor’s office, where I can easily dispatch a short story while waiting—maybe even a couple). Other readers will have different tastes. No matter the form, I’m not into fluff, so I stay away from cozies for the most part, for example, and eschew romance stories (“bodice rippers”) as well (the latter preference also eliminates all those Hallmark made-for-TV movies). Again, other readers will have different tastes and opinions. Moreover, readers will make different demands. Some readers abhor cliffhangers (I’m one of them); others do not. Some readers love series, getting downright comfortable with the characters, even if the stories become formulaic; others do not. (I’m in between those two camps. I expect each short story, novella, and novel to be a complete story, even if the novel is in a series. I’ve also lost interest in formulaic series, whether the books are complete stories, so I no longer read Baldacci, Child, or Grafton, for example.)
There are arguments about how choosing a form is part of “knowing your market.” The latter, a mantra of many “writing mavens,” applies more to a person going on Shark Tank than a modern author, though. I lean more to the “build it and they will come” school. Your goal is always to spin a good yarn—doing well at the art of storytelling, if you will—not writing to a specific market. When you finally admit that making a name for yourself or having an immensely popular work has odds similar to winning Powerball, you’ll come around to my way of thinking. Sure, I’d like great name recognition and a NY Times bestseller as much as the next gal or guy, but my writing enjoyment will always be derived from my storytelling, in whatever form the story takes.
In libris libertas!
