This week: How did short stories evolve into novels? And just who defines what counts as a short story anyway? We figure it out. Plus footnotes and just a little trivia to speed us on our way. Let’s get to it.
Confession time: this post actually prompted this entire volume of the newsletter. Back in September of last year, I started making a pair of lists. The first list contained nothing but word counts. Over 55,000 words? That's a novel. Under ten thousand but more than a thousand? Short story. Between ten and fifty-five thousand? Well…depends on who you ask. But knowing which publishers use which word count is important for anyone writing fiction. It helps you pitch, it helps you submit, it even helps you write1.
As I built my list, I kept coming across words that weren't relevant to my practical list, but that were no less intriguing for that. Some represented semi-vanished genres like picaresque or epistolary novels. Others, like roman a clef and bildungsroman give common genres a glow-up. And others still are words for new types of genres and forms, like flash fiction or <shudder> twitterature. So I started building a second list. If the first set down the limits and conventions of the forms modern fiction takes, then the second is a list of labels used to describe them.
In trying to build and maintain these lists, I got the idea to make this volume of Learned all about the words we use when we talk about words2. And so, with our definition and understanding of fiction from last week, let's dive into the different forms of fiction.
Here's the easiest breakdown, from Wikipedia:
Novel 40,000 words or over
Novella 17,500 to 39,999 words
Novelette 7,500 to 17,499 words
Short story 20 to 7,500 words
It's important to note that even Wikipedia's sources disagree on just how long each of these works ought to be. And, when you add in different reading levels and ages, the definitions all change again. Which is to say that a young adult novel may be considerably shorter than a literary novel and yet both are considered novels. In fact, a word length that might be acceptable for a young adult novel (say 30,000 words) might be considered only a novella in a more grown-up oriented work3.
But let's back up a step. Where did these conventions originate? What was the first novel and who decided it was a novel in the first place?
Well...depends on who you ask. Take a look at another Wikipedia list, this time for "Claimed first novels in English." The earliest book on the list is Le Morte d'Arthur (1470 c.e.), followed by Beware the Cat (1533), and concluded by Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 17404.
But if you expand beyond the English language, the earliest novels come from much earlier centuries with the world's first novel, the Tale of Genji, coming from Japan in the year 10105.
Somewhat ironically, the word novel actually comes from a description of short stories, novella, having been shortened and refined over the centuries. And short stories, well...
Short stories have always been with us. Fairytales, myths, legends, folktales, and a whole host of other oral traditions gave rise to the short story as we know it today. All these stories were recounted again and again until the advent of book making, when they began to be recorded for the ages. Over time, the rhythms and cadences of these stories, as collected in books, became calcified into conventions. In other words, when Chaucer first began recording the jokes and tall tales that would eventually become The Canterbury Tales, he tried to capture the way they were told. Subsequent writers attempted to copy the patterns of the stories in their own works. Over time, as language changed, writers began altering the patterns of their stories, sometimes to reflect things more accurately, other times to encourage the reading public to return to a more "elite" manner of speech.
As fascinating as these histories are (and they are, there's a lot more to read about than there is time and space to relay it here), for better or worse, it is the publishing industry that controls these definitions today. And they do so via word count. Over the next few weeks, we'll get into all the different publisher terms for works of fiction as well as the vast world of genre definitions. It'll be a good read, I promise.
Trivially Yours
I mentioned above that the Tale of Genji can be considered one of, if not the, world’s first novels. So what’s it about? In the words of the esteemed Wikipedia:
The work recounts the life of Hikaru Genji, or "Shining Genji", the son of an ancient Japanese emperor, known to readers as Emperor Kiritsubo, and a low-ranking concubine called Kiritsubo Consort. For political reasons, the emperor removes Genji from the line of succession, demoting him to a commoner by giving him the surname Minamoto, and he pursues a career as an imperial officer. The tale concentrates on Genji's romantic life and describes the customs of the aristocratic society of the time.
I’ll confess that I’ve tried to read it in translation a few times and never made it more than a third of the way through it. It is a slog. What’s a lot more fun to read is Usagi Yojimbo, a long-running comic by Stan Sakai centered around the character of Miyamoto Usagi and set in ancient Japan. Bits and pieces spanning the breadth of Japanese classical literature, mythology, and folk legends make their way into the story. It is a lot of fun.
Stay curious,
J
Having a daily target is one of the most effective tools in the writer's toolbox. Knowing what you're writing and what the final word count is lets you break the work into smaller, more manageable chunks that work for your schedule.
This isn't meta, I swear. I know meta. I don't like meta. This is just self-referential. Tautalogical even. But never meta.
Part of the fun is knowing that literary and genre conventions get upended all the damn time.
You'd think that even having options from three hundred years prior would be enough to null that claim, but...
Because the world is the way it is, there is a lot of argument around this claim that basically boils down to "well, it's not a Western novel and the word novel describes a Western literary tradition and so, therefore, and because, ipso facto, Genji can't be a novel." Sure. Whatever you say, pal. That said, there is a lot of consensus around calling Don Quixote the first modern, western novel.