Monday, May 21: The Scribbler
GOING TO ANY LENGTH
by James Lincoln Warren
What makes a short story, well, short?
The, uh, short answer is word count. We can learn a little about how word counts, uh, count, by taking a look at the awards that are given for short genre fiction.
Mystery Writers of America offers two annual awards for short stories, the Robert L. Fish Award for Best First Short Story and the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, and defines a short story as being 22,000 words or less. Most other mystery awards—the Anthony, Agatha, etc., follow suit.
The Short Fiction Mystery Society offers its Derringer Award in four categories: flash story (up to 500 words), short-short story (501 to 2,000 words), mid-length short story (2,001 to 6,000 words), and longer short story (6,001 to 15,000 words).
The World Science Fiction Society, which awards the Hugo Award, has the following three categories: short story (less than 7,500 words), novelette (between 7,500 and 17,500 words), and novella (between 17,500 and 40,000 words). Science Fiction Writers of America, givers of the Nebula Award, use the same criteria.
So what does this mean? And should we care?
First of all, let me say that I do not regard “flash†stories as true short stories. This isn’t to disparage the form, but I have never run into a flash story that follows the classic six-point paradigm: exposition, point of conflict, development, climax, denouement, resolution. Flash stories are structured like a joke: set-up (=exposition), punch line. So I think flash stories probably do deserve their own category. Any flash story longer than 1000 words is most likely a shaggy dog story and could probably stand to be trimmed.
But I’m at a loss to explain the difference between short-short and mid-short. How many words does it take to tell a story? As many as it takes. (Like the famous exchange between Austrian Emperor Josef II and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart concerning WAM’s opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Emperor: “There are too many notes, Mr. Mozart.†WAM: “There are neither more nor fewer than were needed, Your Majesty.â€)
In my view, a short story only exposits the elements necessary for the tale to be told. Whether a story does that in 3,000 words or 7,000 words makes very little difference as far as the manner in telling it is concerned, any more than a novel of 70,000 words is structurally fundamentally different from one of 200,000 words.
But I like the novelette and novella distinctions, because these are stories that either contain other elements than those strictly necessary to the story, such as deeper characterization, or follow more than one plot thread, which makes them a kind of amalgam of short story and novel techniques. Novelettes are more closely akin to short stories; novellas to novels.
More than once, I’ve had the experience of suddenly realizing that for a work in progress to succeed, it had to be longer than planned—a story I intended for 5,000 words wasn’t finished until it weighed in at a hefty 12,000 words. The story called for being a novelette, not a short story, because it required rather extensive exposition and followed two plot tracks, one for the villain and another for the detective. Conversely, I expected my last finished story to weigh in around 8,000 words when done, but realized that most of the development was completely superfluous, so I cut what Elmore Leonard calls “the parts that people don’t read†and finished it at something just under 4,000 words—half its originally intended length.
Thinking in word lengths is one of the most difficult things for a writer to learn, but it’s also one of the most basic. Fiction writers trained in journalism have a leg up on the rest of us in this regard. Screenwriters, who are taught to think in page lengths, are especially challenged.
But how much do word lengths really matter?
Tell me what you think.
Plugs Dept.
The inimitable Gary Phillips has asked me to pass on the following:
Gary Phillips, Darrell James and Robert S. Levinson will be featured in Summer Shorts—Murder in Small Doses, a panel on writing the short story on Saturday, June 2, 2 to 4 pm, at the Burbank Library, Buena Vista Branch, 300 N. Buena Vista St., Burbank CA 91505, ph: (818) 238-5600.
That should be one crackin’ good panel.
P.S.
In case, gentle reader, you wonder (as did Tom Walsh) why the time stamp is so far in advance of your American clocks, it is because I set the time stamp for Greenwich Mean Time as a gesture of amity to our international readers. (And also because it means we can post the next day’s posts the night before, which greatly simplifies things …)
On book-length works — There are novels, short story collections, and that masquerader: the “psuedo-novel,” a collation of short stories featuring series charachers. The “pseudo-novel” is a sly way to get short story-averse readers to consume short fiction. After all, were not the greatest early novels episodic?
Come to think of it, Tom, Ray Bradbury ‘novels’ were actually short story productions, The Illustrated Man, for example. In his Martial Chronicles, some of the tales weren’t even consistent with others.
Personally, I just like a good story. The length doesn’t matter as much as how the story unfolds and involves me as a reader to care what happens next. I’ve read extremely short pieces that have touched me as much (and sometimes more) than a tome I could barely lift. I’ve read too many stories that should have been much shorter. By the way, it isn’t easy completing a story, complete with a crime in less than 600 words, but seven of us did it 49 times in Seven By Seven. One of them (John M. Floyd’s “Four for Dinner”) just won a Derringer.
[…] of short stories. And when James Lincoln Warren wrote about the subcategories of short stories (The Scribbler May 21), it was like manna from heaven. This isn’t a continuation of Jim’s article. In fact, if you […]