Juggling all the aspects of my life with some baking, writing and good old fashioned ranting thrown in
Showing posts with label novella. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novella. Show all posts

Tuesday, 14 August 2012

A short story, a novella or a novelette?

Despite having a novel on the go already, I decided to start writing a short story as well (there will be some shameless self-publicity for this at the end of the post). This is mostly because I have been writing this novel for quite a while and I know it's not going to be finished for a long time yet - I'm only roughly halfway through the first draft! 

But after showing my new work to my Other Half, he suggested that this story could be made much longer than a short story. Knowing that I have not got the time to start a whole new novel, plus that would risk the old one being forgotten, I wondered how long a short story could really be before it becomes something else. So I turned to my old friend, Google. It turns out, a short story is generally anything below 7,500 words. More than that, and it becomes a "novelette", something I had never even heard of before. A novella, which I ignorantly thought was just another, more fancy way of saying short story, is anything above 17,500 words. I had no idea that literary genres were so complicated! 

If you're interested in reading the first part of my short story, it can be found here: http://ameliaappletree.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/short-story/