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When Short is Long

Wikipedia defines a novel­la as “a nar­ra­tive prose fic­tion whose length is short­er than most nov­els, but longer than most short stories.”

There are debates as to what exact­ly this means, but there seems to be a gen­er­al agree­ment that it is a sto­ry of no more than one hun­dred and fifty print­ed pages, and as brief as six­ty. You can choose your own pagination.

My own def­i­n­i­tion is that a novel­la is a nov­el that you can read — in its entire­ty — in three or four hours. Obvi­ous­ly, that depends on your own read­ing speed, but I like the notion that you can read the work in one long sit­ting. In fact, one of the plea­sures of read­ing a novel­la is that you absorb the whole nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ence in one go.

Among famous novel­las, there is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gats­by, pub­lished a hun­dred years ago. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Dick­ens’ A Christ­mas Car­ol. James’ Turn of the Screw, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and on it goes. You get the idea.

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A Christmas Carol
The Turn of the Screw
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

[If you go to the inter­net and type in “Best novel­las,” you can find any num­ber of long lists. I bet you may be sur­prised by how many titles you know.]

What’s not gen­er­al­ly not­ed is that count­less children’s book nov­els, in fact, fit the def­i­n­i­tion of novel­las. You can start with Alice in Won­der­land.

From this writer’s point of view, cre­at­ing one is very sat­is­fy­ing. It’s no sur­prise then that I’ve writ­ten a good num­ber. Among them, The Fight­ing Ground, The But­ton War, Some­thing Upstairs. And the forth­com­ing The Road from Nowhere (Jan­u­ary 2026, no cov­er image avail­able yet).

I don’t mean to take any­thing away from the expe­ri­ence of a long nov­el, which has the read­er liv­ing with char­ac­ters and sto­ry for an extend­ed, deep peri­od of time and thought. I have a love­ly mem­o­ry of read­ing a Trol­lop nov­el, start­ing one ear­ly Fri­day evening, and spend­ing all of a rainy Sat­ur­day — far into the night — lux­u­ri­at­ing in all nine hun­dred or so pages. It was like liv­ing an extra life.

But there is a nar­ra­tive ten­sion and move­ment in a novel­la that can give enor­mous ener­gy in the telling. Know­ing that the read­er will take them in with one (or two) immer­sive gulps means that you need to hone your prose to its sharpest edge, allow­ing for both poet­ic dic­tion as well as insight­ful sparks of rev­e­la­tion. The short jour­ney means there is not a lot of ask­ing, “Are we there yet?”

In the revi­sion process — which I always love — you need to be hard with your edits, pre­cise in your vocab­u­lary, smart in your plot­ting, and rev­e­la­to­ry in char­ac­ter delin­eation. It’s also not beside the point that in the revi­sion process, you can take in the whole novel­la, so it works as just that — the whole work. No room for a lot of loose threads — to mix my metaphors.

I’ll even go so far as to sug­gest that children’s fic­tion often has an out­sized impact because it has the novella’s impact. Watch a young per­son read one. 

Short novel­las can bring long memories.

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