You learn something new everyday

In the past I have always considered authors works either short stories (more than one story per book) or books.  Today I was informed of the term novella.  I had heard the term before in theory but, had never actually thought to apply it in reality. 

So of course whenever I learn something "new" I have to do some research (wikipedia is always a good place to start) and figure out how I should use it in the future.  Definitions seem to vary greatly across genres for the word count associated with each of these terms.

I decided to use the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) Awards site as my guide for the word count of each of the stories that I review from this point on.

Literary terms:

• Short Short < 1000 words
• Short Story between  1,000 and   7,500 words
• Novelette    between  7,500 and 17,499 words
• Novella       between 17,500 and 39,999 words 
• Novel          > 40,000 words

So how do you figure word count?  Turns out that your word program doesn't necessarily count right. What-is-a-word by Chuck Rothman explains it fairly well.

So if we figure 10.5 words per line and 28 lines per page we get 294 words per page.

So for my purposes:

• short short  <  3.5  pages
• short story  <   25  pages
• novellette    < 59.5 pages
• novella        < 136 pages
• novel           > 136 pages 

I learned even more than that though. 

A short story is often in narrative format.  It contains a limited number of characters, covers a short time duration, usually has a single setting and a single plot.

A novella is more complicated than a short story but usually contains no chapters, a single viewpoint, and does not usually contain subplots.

Both a novella and a short story are designed to be read in a single sitting.

Since I always want to learn more this was a great lesson learned.


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