Categories

[BlackSnake]

What makes Novels and Novellas?

 

[Lauren Hynde]

Length and complexity.

Short story > Novella > Novel

 

[BlackSnake]

Length and complexity.

Short story > Novella > Novel

Still a bit vague...

 

[Lauren Hynde]

A novel is lengthy prose work, usually exceeding 150 pages. In an ideal world, it is admired by a stranger (editor), then printed, bound and (well) distributed for public consumption. In a perfect world, this physical object touches at least one other person's life by (a) interfering with that unknown person's sleep/marital harmony (b) alleviating the gloom of public transit/lunch in a cubicle or (c) by merely distracting the reader for a period of hours, days or weeks in a pleasurable manner, and in a comfy chair. I don't think a 150 pages long stroke story qualifies.

 

[Gabriel_Lee]

But there could be a first!

 

[BlackSnake]

Slinging 6000 words per chapter for 10 to 12 chapters doesn't seem to qualify as a Novel

 

[Lauren Hynde]

A series of short stories doesn't generally surmount to a novel. Ergo the complexity bit.

 

[BlackSnake]

A series of short stories doesn't generally surmount to a novel. Ergo the complexity bit.

Yes, but if they are actual chapters and not unrelated events...then what?

 

[Lauren Hynde]

Yes, but if they are actual chapters and not unrelated events...then what?

I said a series of short stories doesn't surmount to a novel, not a group of disjointed stand-alone stories.

Take your average Literotica 10 chapters' series, including pretty much every Chain Story.

- Ch.1: Bored housewife seduces the husband.
- Ch.2: Slightly less bored housewife decides to try anal sex with the husband.
- Ch.3: Rather amused housewife sees husband off to work and is caught masturbating in the back yard by the next door neighbour.
- Ch.4: Neighbour's wife catches them at it and joins the fun.
- Ch.5: The milkman arrives and bring all sorts of dairy products.
- Ch.6: Giddy housewife orders pizzas for the whole gang. The pizza delivery boy comes with 2 college friends (one of them happens to be the giddy housewife's son) and they all join the fun.
- Ch.7: A group of cheerleaders (two of them are the twin daughters of the next door neighbour) are passing by the street when they catch a glimpse of what's going on in the backyard and the party really starts.
- Ch.8: Somebody unleashes the family pet.
- Ch.9: Tired husband comes back from work to find everyone passed out from exhaustion, and butt fucks the unconscious next door neighbour.
- Ch.10: Everyone wakes up and go at it again. The housewife comes to terms with her previously undreamt slutty nature and lives happily ever after.

Entertaining? Possibly. Fun to read? Absolutely. But have you gained anything from it that you couldn't get from any number is unrelated stories? Does this collection give you any insight about human nature? Is it really an elaborate metaphor for the civilizational chaos of the 21st century western world? I seriously doubt it.

Not a novel...

 

[BlackSnake]

Wait, why is the housewife so sex straved? Where does her need come from? How far will she go? What makes her realize the consequences of her actions? How is she satisfied? What is her projected outcome?

Raising conflict, peek, and falling action. Yes?

 

[Lauren Hynde]

Wait, why is the housewife so sex straved? Where does her need come from? How far will she go? What makes her realize the consequences of her actions? How is she satisfied? What is her projected outcome?

Raising conflict, peek, and falling action. Yes?

Exactly. If you start thinking like that, if you make those questions the central elements of the story (the whole story, not the one fragmented into 10 stand-alone chapters), you'll see how the above "outline" can't be a novel, since it misses all the important points. You can probably expand one good short story to make a good novel, but it must be nearly impossible to condense a 10 chapters' series into one.

 

[BlackSnake]

So, if each chapter having it's own elements contain elements of a global prespective, then the collective whole can form a novel?

 

[Lauren Hynde]

I don't see why not. I think that to make it a novel, the global perspective should always superseed any chapter specific elements, though.

 

[BlackSnake]

Not to get too far off, but my office mate just showed me this cracked me up.

Now, back on track.

I've been wanting to write a novel, something that I can share as I'm creating it.

Do you outline your work? What I do, I believe is called free writing. I come up with a general idea and start writing visualizing the character's actions as I go. How much prep work do you do?

 

[Lauren Hynde]

How much prep work do you do?

Way too fucking much. I know everything that is going to happen. Every scene, every character, all the important images. I know what the story is about and every element has to fit and make the plot move in that direction. While I'm actually writing, the only thing I do is deciding which words to use (which words, not which tone; that has already been decided for each key moment).

That is the plan. Of course that hardly anyone can follow it. If you take too much time to write, the ideas will mutate and force you to rethink and rewrite. Always keep your eye on the global perspective. Don't sidetrack.

 

[BlackSnake]

If I don't get a hard-on. I stop. I would get bored and go back to programming.

I need to be in there with the characters, jumping from body to body or looking through the window. I know if I tried what you're doing I wouldn't even complete the planning.

Maybe that's why I'm a programmer and not an analyst.

cout >> "Hello World!";

Betcha didn't misspell anything there

 

[Lauren Hynde]

I don't advise anyone to do what I do. It's brutal.

But it's not that different, really. Before I start writing I've already played every scene in my head like a movie a million times. I've jumped from body to body. I know them inside and out. But they are my characters. They aren't controlling the story, I am. If they try to take the story in a direction I don't like, I am the only one who can stop them. Who can redefine them.

 

[BlackSnake]

I don't advise anyone to do what I do. It's brutal.

But it's not that different, really. Before I start writing I've already played every scene in my head like a movie a million times. I've jumped from body to body. I know them inside and out. But they are my characters. They aren't controlling the story, I am. If they try to take the story in a direction I don't like, I am the only one who can stop them. Who can redefine them.

Yeah, I delete a few paragraphs when they do something too stupid, but mainly I'm along for the ride.

 

[Rainbow Skin]

And a novella is the result of being determined to write a real novel for once, and finding you can't, yet. A novella is more usually a very long short story, rather than a very short novel, lacking the required complexity. Writing words, after all, is easy, if length were the only consideration. Getting the structure to hold up like Beauvais Cathedral, and feel right all the way through two hundred pages, is the hard part of the novel.

 

[BlackSnake]

I'm figuring about 12 chapters at about 6000 words, which I did in the last series I wrote in the last couple of weeks. That's about 72000 words or about 120 pages 8.5x11 single spaced. Is that a generally good size?

 

[Lauren Hynde]

And a novella is the result of being determined to write a real novel for once, and finding you can't, yet. A novella is more usually a very long short story, rather than a very short novel, lacking the required complexity. Writing words, after all, is easy, if length were the only consideration. Getting the structure to hold up like Beauvais Cathedral, and feel right all the way through two hundred pages, is the hard part of the novel.

Unfortunately, I have to agree that seems to be the case with most novellas, these days.

I'd like to say that the true novella is neither, but a true prosaic form of its own right, and it has been so throughout history at times, and in some places. A form with its own rules and style. I'm sure many consider it is.

What everyone is aware, though, is of its impracticality as a published form, today. Too short to make a profitable book, too long to be published in magazines in one sitting, it's as if void of purpose.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

I think anywhere above 50000 words is a commonly accepted novel size.

 

[MlledeLaPlumeBleu]

"Lauren Hynde?

Do I know you, baby? I don't think I do. We went to Camden together? Didn't you like, die in a car accident in 1985?"


--Victor

 

[Lauren Hynde]

LOL

My secret is out. The news about my death have been highly exaggerated and somewhat premature. I like to think I was given a new life in that frozen winter of '85.

 

[MlledeLaPlumeBleu]

Yeah baby, I see you around with that Damien Nuchts-Ross....but baby, I think your name is Eva. Jaime said you're not Lauren Hynde after all- but then again, she wasn't Jaime either- and didn't you blow up a hotel in Spain?

*Laugh*

(Have you ever witnessed a novelist who could elicit such visceral reactions from people simply by writing the truth? I mean- people either love him or hate him, to the ultimate degree. Me, I think he's fucking brilliant. I guess you do too)