19.17: Novellas the Goldilocks of Publishing
Writing Excuses
Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2024
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you find the right size for your story? And speaking of size, what do novellas do differently than both short stories and novels? What even is the difference between a novel and a novella? How many characters do they usually have? How many subplots? How do you know if your story should take the form of a novella or a novel? We dive into all these questions (and…you guessed it… more!) in our conversation.
A note on the structure of Season 19: in between our close reading series (six episodes where we dive into an element of craft through a close reading of a specific text), we’ll be doing two wild card episodes! These episodes are random topics that our hosts have been wanting to tell you about, we just didn’t know where they fit. So we MADE a place for them to fit!
Thing of the Week:
Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall (a collaborative, storytelling-based RPG)
Homework:
Take a short story that you either love or have written and write a list of things that could be added to expand it to novella length. Now do the same for a novel, but make it a list of things that might need to be cut.
A Reminder!
That starting May 12th, we'll be focusing on Worldbuilding and reading A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. If you’re going to buy this book, we have this bookshop link available for you to do so! (If not, go support your local library!) https://bookshop.org/lists/close-readings-season-19
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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar, Mary Robinette Kowal, and DongWon Song. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. |
| 0:05.6 | If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit |
| 0:08.9 | www.patreon.com slash writing excuses. |
| 0:15.0 | Hey listeners, we want your input on season 20, |
| 0:18.4 | which I have to be honest does not sound like a real number. |
| 0:21.0 | What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode |
| 0:25.5 | or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? What are you just having trouble |
| 0:31.8 | with? After 20 seasons we've talked about a lot What element of writing do you wish we'd |
| 0:35.0 | of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the |
| 0:40.1 | podcast? |
| 0:41.1 | Email your ideas to podcast at writing excuses.com. |
| 0:45.0 | Season 19 episode 17 |
| 0:50.0 | This is writing excuses. |
| 0:54.0 | Novellas, the Goldilocks of publishing. |
| 0:56.0 | I'm Erin. I'm Mary Robinette. |
| 0:58.0 | And I'm Dung-One. |
| 1:00.0 | And I wanted to talk a little bit in this wild card about Novellas because I feel like as I was coming up in the publishing industry in Speck, |
| 1:10.0 | Novellas went from like a thing that occasionally showed up in a magazine like Asimov's or analog to a huge category with actual books that you can buy on the shelves and I wanted to understand a little bit more about |
| 1:24.1 | like when do you know something should be a novella versus a short story or a novel? |
| 1:28.9 | And it's for me one of the things that is interesting about it is the, that it reflects the kind of fashion of writing because some of the books that I loved most were incredibly short books. And so I feel like for me what a Novella does is that it |
| 1:44.9 | allows me to go a little bit deeper and more immersive in my world building |
| 1:49.5 | take some of those side trips that I want to take that I don't have space for in a short story, |
... |
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