The Length of a Story

[sarillia]

Is there a way to tell before you start writing whether an idea is more suited to a short story or a novel? I seem to be completely hopeless at judging this right now and I’d like to get better at it. It feels like it should be obvious but somehow it’s not for me. I look at a few of the novel-length stories I've written, and I don't know what made me think that the idea would sustain a novel, even though it did work. They could have just as easily been short stories or novellas.

I got my start in writing with National Novel Writing Month, so novels sort of became my default. Now I'm trying to write more short stories and I'm shifting my thoughts so that I assume each idea will be a short story unless it feels like it should be a novel. But I'm not sure how to judge that.

Comments

[agilebrit]

There are a few ways. I always plan for "short" because "novel" is not my natural length and never has been. But whether it's 5K or 15K or anywhere in between is really up in the air until I'm done with it and then trying to cram it into the wordcount of whatever antho I'm attempting to sub it to.

There's the MICE quotient: Is it a Mileau, Idea, Character, or Event story? If you have all four as major elements in there, you have a novel. A short can sustain one, maybe two of those, depending on how short you want it to be. Anything more and you're in novelette or novella territory at least.

There's also the notion that each character adds at least 500 words to the story. The more characters you have, the higher your wordcount will be. That being said, I've crammed five Characters, an Idea, and an Event into a story that's under 4000 words long while sustaining a murder mystery with two bodies and three perpetrators.

At the end of the day, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish with the story. Generally speaking, I just outline it, and whatever length it turns out to be in the writing is the length it is. I don't worry about how long it is until I start subbing it places.

no hard and fast rules, of course

[splinteredstar]

Yeah, I think the big difference is...scope. How complicated you want to make it, and how much detail you want to go into, how subtle you want it to be.

One of the matrices I use, I realize, is how long the major action is going to take in real time. If the character development takes place all at once or over maybe, a day or two, then it would be a short story.

If it's incremental or complex and takes place over months or years, then possibly a novel.

On the other hand, real time doesn't translate to word count, and it matters how much detail you want to go into or how much context is required, how much summation you use....


...so basically it's a math equation with about 17 variables in it, and if I could figure out how to make it equal the end word count, we'd be golden.

[caecilia]

For me I have to start writing. But it's okay to try it in as many different forms as you want. Ideas are flexible.

[lookingforoctober]

I keep thinking about things like Ender's Game (originally a short story before it was expanded into a novel). Anne McCaffrey had a few of those too (I think the first two novels in her Tower and Hive series were originally short stories), and Isaac Asimov had Nightfall and maybe some others. There are also books like The Anvil of the World by Kage Baker, made up of pieces that used to be separate stories but which come together into a well defined book.

It makes me wonder if there really is a length that any particular story is more suited to, or whether it's just up to what you prefer to write.

[inevitableentresol]

I am so bad at judging length of a story. It's the one thing I need to work on next.

I think the suggestion above about going by how long the action in the story takes place over might be a good rule of thumb. I'll use that the next few times and see how it goes.

[chordatesrock]

synecdochic has a helpful bit of meta about that (and a lot of other helpful writing meta), to the effect that one action plot plus one theme or emotional plot equals a short story, two or more action plots plus two or more emotional plots equals a novel, and in between you have novellas.

If I wanted to guarantee I was writing a novel, I'd probably choose to have significant arcs of character development for more than one character, an unsimple action plot, and a plan for changes requiring lots and lots of incremental steps along the way.

If I started writing something by the seat of my pants and wanted to know whether it was going to be a novel or a short story or what, I'd look at how much I was setting up. For instance, if I had written twenty pages and felt that my plot had barely begun, that would be a major clue that it was a novel. And if I found that I had finished setting things up and my plot was already moving forward on the third page, that would be a sign that it would shape up to be fairly short.