Some Words

As someone who has, for some time, been trying to write in long form prose. I have had a good deal of time to consider the relative merits of longer and shorter novels. Granted, there are plenty of people in this boat with me, but it’s my blog, so if you’re reading, you’re reading my view on this.

It takes less time to write a novella than a novel. Unless you are prone to writer’s block, or general paralysis and fear, when it comes to your fiction. You will be able to turn out a novella much faster than you will be able to squeeze out a novel. It’s a pity that an industry that once published large quanities of the former, now turns out mostly the later.

The novella was a form that was well suited to the dime novel era, low cost to produce, and thus relatively low risk. It was consumed by the reader in short order, and could be produced by an author of moderate to good skill in little time. Agatha Christy managed to churn out quite of few of them, for example. Each one was a tightly plotted and economical with words. This has its strengths and weaknesses of course. But it allowed her to create a situation in which she got those who liked her work to toss in more money very frequently. My father once told me that they had an old advertising slogan back in the day, “a Christy for Christmas.”

Now, Christy is perhaps a bad example, as she was so successful. Writing in a certain form will certainly not guarantee success. Philip K. Dick was certainly not financially successful, despite churning out books at quite a clip. Dick was also a little inconsistent. His sanity/drug issues, which helped propel his writing, made some of his novels… less than excellent reading.

Novellas were mostly the realm of mass market, with little intent spent on making them high art, as least from the publisher’s perspective. The high volume and low cost made them less of a risk. Like the movie industry, the publishing industry has shifted more to the blockbuster approach, which rewards phenomenons more than it does hard workers. This is exacerbated by seemingly absurd internal issues. Random House, for example, allowed its internal publishing houses to bid against each other on advances for authors. This artificially raised the advance, and thus the risk to the publisher, which in turn made it less likely to take a risk on new or marginal author.

I’m not prone to believing in golden ages, and I’d be willing to bet that there are just as many, if not more, novel readers than there were 50 years ago. But as I said all those weeks ago in the first post about novellas, there is a lot of stuff out there vying for there attention. Mysteries of Pittsburgh, just to pick a quick example, benefited from being relatively short. That low bar of entry helped get a new novelist an audience (being mistakenly identified as an up and coming gay author apparently didn’t hurt either).

And where did all of this come from? I had been writing one day, and suddenly was worried that some part of me was trying to write “the next great American novel.” It had gotten big, and sprawling, and at the time looked dangerously close to getting out of my control. A shorter novel sounded like something I could write quickly, and then work over and over until it was just right. It sounded almost relaxing, and then I remembered how out of favor novellas had fallen.