Hello, dreamers. As you may have read in this week’s “Writer’s Desk“, I’ve decided to shift my focus for the next few months to shorter works. For the first time, I’m writing novellas.

For those who may not be familiar with the term, novella is a publishing industry term for a work of fiction that lies between short story and novel length. As with many industry terms, the word count that differentiates a “novella” from a “novel” or “short story” is subjective and tends to change over time. But traditionally, a novella has been regarded as a work of fiction between 20,000-40,000 words in length.

A quick personal note: one of the most common questions I’m asked about my work is “How many pages is it?” Publishing teaches writers to think in terms of word count, because the page count will vary depending upon medium, font size, etc. My novel Pioneers is around 102k words long. I have no idea how many pages it will be.

I have written two novels and parts of three others. I have written enough short stories that I cannot innumerate them off the top of my head. But I have never (at least not intentionally) written a novella. Until now, the closest I came was periodically writing a short story, and suddenly realizing I had a lot more than the industry-standard 7,500 words. So I am in uncharted waters. And that brings me to my current work-in-progress:

MERIT 19

Now, originally MERIT 19 was written as a short story. As with many of the stories that have become Turn of the Century, it was intended to be part of a short story collection: a companion to my novels, which will be traditionally published. And as with ALL of those stories, it ended up being a lot longer than I’d expected.

Ironically, I found myself in the tenuous territory of a “novelette”: at around 12k words, it was far too long to publish in a literary mag. But when I changed gears and decided to release it as a novella, I suddenly went from worrying it was too long to worrying it was too short. I believe in giving readers a bang for their buck: if I sell something as a novella, I’m damn sure gonna give them at least 20,000 words of Martians and lasers.

My initial efforts to flesh out MERIT 19 largely consisted of me adding a lot of the substance I’d intentionally avoided the first time around. Because short stories are meant to be…well, short…by necessity they must be narrow. A short story will have only one major character, and at most only one to three other characters. Backstory is kept to a minimum, worldbuilding is limited to whatever is imminently vital to the story. I view a short story as a single moment in time: I richly describe the immediate scene, but provide very little in the way of context.

So I began fleshing out the main characters, saying more about who they were. But as I did so, I began to notice more problems. As with many of my short fiction pieces, MERIT 19 was not completed in a day. I wrote bits and pieces of it here and there over the course of several years. And while I wrote the second half of the story about a year ago, much of the earlier paragraphs no longer looked remotely like anything I would write.

So, I did something drastic (and, I’ll admit, risky): I decided to start over. For me, this isn’t unprecedented. I began Pioneers three times before I finally got it right. Each time, I did so by setting aside everything I’d written previously, and starting with a blank page. At times, I found passages where I felt I couldn’t say it better than I did the first time. So I’d simply copy and paste from the original file. But I’ve found it can be easy to fall into a rut while writing: trying to make incremental changes to a work can be difficult, because I’m used to it. To give a work a completely different tone, I have to start over, and force myself to say it again.

I’m pleased to say it’s gone very well. As of tonight, I’m nearly finished with the first draft of MERIT 19. Once that’s finished, I’ll begin editing, and it’ll be on to the next installment of Turn of the Century. Until then, as always, dare to dream. – MK