To mark the publication this week of my first ever novella - The Last To Drown - I dug out the post I wrote back when I was editing it, exploring the nature of novella writing. I found very little advice at the time on how to structure and craft novellas, beyond some super unhelpful ‘like a novel but shorter’, so I’m sharing my post again in the hopes it might embolden anyone feeling cautious of playing with this fascinating, fun and increasingly popular form.
First though, I wanted to talk a little about publishing this wee book. And why I chose to do so.
Aside from the obvious appeal of writing about Icelandic ghosts, there’s a more personal story to this story. As I said when I shared the first chapter, this is my first time writing the experience of chronic pain. It’s not something I’ve wanted to explore before because it’s quite nice to escape my existence in my stories! But I increasingly wanted to put this voice out into the world anyway. Partly in the hopes it will resonate with other spoonies, and partly to give non-spoonies a wee bit of insight into an inherently isolating experience.
I came to it wanting to do it justice, but I surprised myself with how fun it was!
At the craft level at least, it was fun to play with the liminality and evanescent realities that can define a spoonie adrift on pain and medication side effects. It was fun to lean into the fugue and the fantastical, and draw them out. So while I began this for the representation, I finished it for the shadowy magic and I really hope people love Tinna’s dark and dreamy narrative.
An incredibly pragmatic secondary reason for writing this book was the need at this point in my career to maintain some momentum. I was due to be going on submission with We Are All Ghosts In The Forest and knew how slow that process had become, and saw a risk that I’d end up with a ‘gap’ (lolsob) of a (gasp) year or more between Mother Sea and Ghosts being published. Writing and publishing a novella in the inter-rim would keep me in people’s minds, hopefully, and keep this tiny, mossy ball rolling.
As it happened, Ghosts sold … not fast but definitely not as slow as many, so 2024 is now a Novel+Novella+Paperback year, which is bonkers and wonderful.
I am so proud of my wee ghosty, dreamy, icy book, and really hope you will give it a try. (Luna Press, Amazon, Waterstones, B&N)
But in the meantime, if any of you are curious about writing your own, read on!
(written in May 2022)
I wrote my first novella a couple of months ago, and am editing it now (not right now – now I’m procrastinating & it’s set in Iceland, so you’re getting random Icelandic photos. Sorry, I don’t make the rules). This being my first novella experience I did some reading around to see what people’s advice was about structuring them. Almost everything I found boiled down to ‘It’s like a novel, but shorter’. Which is … not entirely helpful. Especially when my starting point was a short story.
[FYI in case you weren’t sure, a novella is usually considered to be between 20-60,000 words, novels between 80-120k and short stories get defined pretty much any way that takes your fancy so long as it’s less than 20k (but usually lie in the 2–8,000 range).]
The advice ‘like a novel but shorter’ means this: It relies on similar narrative arcs, but those arcs are simpler, the plot is simpler, the character lists and worldbuilding are streamlined. It’s basically a novel-type idea but where the plot didn’t need 80,000 words to unfold. That makes sense, right?
But my starting point wasn’t a novel-type idea, it was a 2,500 word short story that felt unresolved and … squished. So if you’re like me & have short stories that want to grow, how do you reframe them to turn them into a functional novella?
First, how do you know what’s a novella-worthy idea?
Check whether your 2,500 word story really just wants to be a 5,000 word story. Was the plot or worldbuilding just a bit rushed & needs a wee bit more space to breath? Was there one more scene or one more bit of backstory that would really pull the whole thing together? If so, maybe just let it be 5,000 words.
Or, did your plot feel like it was fundamentally lacking depth for the things it was trying to do? My short story was trying to explore PTSD and grief, and to map a descent into dissociation and a big moral choice. Add in ghost stories, family secrets, and a slightly cinematic setting and there’s really no way you can do justice to those things in 5,000 words, let alone 2,500. It wasn’t just that the story as it stood needed a bit more room, it was that the story itself needed huge structural changes to serve its function. Sound familiar? You’ve got yourself a potential novella.
Yay, so now, what’s the difference between your short story idea and your novella? What needs to happen to mutate the former into the latter?
A short story:
Can (although often doesn’t) pivot around an external plot alone – can be about an event rather than a character’s internal change.
Can be slice of life – e.g. there’s no plot per se, no conflict or change, just … an exploration of a character’s mind, world or moment.
Requires very little world building, or more importantly, can afford little worldbuilding. Which, especially if this is SFF, requires a very focused setting so the story’s world feels sufficiently explained within that limited word count.
Generally has a single strand plotline following one question, theme or objective. The longer the wordcount, the more strands to the plot you can fit in, but a 2-3k short can only really carry one central plot convincingly. (That’s not to say it can’t be intricate or thoughtful or multi-layered thematically, but the external plot & the internal narrative? Fairly streamlined.)
Both 3 & 4 above lead to – a very limited cast. There are only so many people we can meet and care about in 3,000 words. Honestly, there aren’t many more we can truly care about at 10,000.
To expand that into a novella, we need to think about:
The internal character arc of your main character(s). What is the theme of your story and how does your character’s journey reflect that? How does their psychological landscape change from beginning to end and why does it change in that way (what events drive it externally and what motivations are driving it internally)?
Bring your secondary characters to life more – you may have more characters to play with, but a smaller cast will still serve you well so don’t go looking for more than you need. Those characters you have though cannot get away with just being a foil for the MC, or 2-dimensional. They will need their their own motivations and psychological landscape. Their arcs are likely to be less pronounced compared to the MC but they need to have something going on that’s independent of the MC.
Where a short story often has a very limited setting, or a narrow focus within a wider setting, you now need to think about developing your setting more. Whether that’s allowing your characters to move around, explaining more of the world’s context, or simply bringing the setting to more vibrant, interactive, dynamic life. I’m a big fan of the power of setting, and focussing that urge down for short fiction is always a bit of a struggle, so it was nice to be able to really lean into that particular area again.
Plot structure (deep breath) …
Now, in our short story, this was streamlined down to the bare minimum number of strands and a fairly simple progression. At novella length we are looking more at the kinds of plot structures we talk about for novels, which I guess is the point all that advice I found was making. 3-Act Structure, but fewer turning points, Save The Cat, but cut down the B-plots or Road Apples or whathaveyou. Writing up from a short, I needed instead to think about adding complexity – where can I make this revelation or decision harder, how about more misunderstandings, or another foreshadowing motif, or adding in a failure or two? Plus, as mentioned above, how do I develop my secondary characters’ own arcs?
One of the things I love about short fiction is that you can more easily be experimental with form and voice than you can at novel length, but I think there’s still a lot of scope for playing around outside the ‘norms’ at novella length too. I took the well known kishōtenketsu 4-Act Structure as my guide here because I wanted to focus on the internal change rather than a ‘conflict’ as such. I don’t think this approach, for this story, would have maintained its power over a longer wordcount, but at 28,000 it felt really powerful and right.
You need to find the sweet spot between developing the story more, but making sure all your development gets fulfilled. If you’ve added more characters, make them engaging and important; if you’ve added a sub-plot, make sure you give it closure; if you’ve introduced wider worldbuilding, make sure it is contributing to the story. Your novella can be pacey and full of action or it can be subtle and dreamy and intricate, but it still has to answer its own questions.
My 2,500 word short story is now a 28,000 novella. Because it was trying to do too much in the first place, I didn’t need to add more characters or sub-plots really, I just needed to actually do justice to all the ideas I was trying to address. So my work was mostly on plot development, backstory, secondary character arcs and setting. Your approach will depend on your starting point, and on the themes and voice you are working with.
I find that novellas can sometimes disappoint if you come to them wanting the complexities of a novel (I read on kindle, so I often don’t realise something is a novella until I’ve started). But where they blow me away is when although the plot might actually be simpler, it doesn’t feel it, because the atmosphere of the story is so unique and strong that the emotional depth is somehow more concentrated. There’s something incredibly powerful about paring a theme back to its absolute heart and then giving that heart richness, depth and nuance. Like a gin & tonic, versus a damson gin liqueur, if you will.
Hopefully this particular gin liqueur will be out in the world at some point, full of Icelandic ghosts, trippy midnight wanderings, the sea and the terrible lure of bargaining for things we have lost. Now I’ve totally and utterly mastered the art form though, I may well return for more…
As you can tell, it is indeed out in the world! And I have started writing another, although it’s currently gathering dust waiting for a gap between editing projects. That one is a climate fiction ghost story, and the challenge I set myself with it was to tell the story through a cyclic & nested narrative structure. It has seven Points of View and takes place over one long day on a floating houseboat in a dying lake. I’m really looking forward to getting back to it!
Next time in Shadows on Water, I’m talking about boundaries - why authors need them, and how to protect your own. Please join me, and thank you for reading today.