Story Length
by Samantha Niemeyer

                    There are easily a hundred things that discourage young writers from believing they will ever have a book of their own on the shelves, or if they’re really successful used for 50 cents on amazon.com. One of them is story length, although for most of us it’s the lack of length. If you can’t write a book that takes up at least as much room as a Harry Potter then what’s the point of writing at all, right? Not really, what will really keep you from writing is comparing your work to someone else’s, and it’s worse when you compare it to an author who is already successful.

     While I don’t support writing for the sole purpose of trying to get published, I can tell you this; good writing is in demand no matter how long it is. You just have to find your natural writing length and embrace it, and if you know what category your particular length fits into you will know how to find other writers who do the same thing.

     There are a lot of very short standard lengths, and a writer can produce very powerful writing with those limitations. In fact, a writer has to work hard to make each word meaningful because they don’t have extra length to hide behind. A pen-pal of mine, Robert A. Sloan, author of the SF epic Raven Dance, and his upcoming fantasy novel "The Steel Guardian” was kind enough to give me his professional view point on story lengths, “Ants can lift things thousands of times their weight. A short-short has to be that strong, because you don't have one word to spare in that form. It's condensed like poetry.”

     A drabble is about as short as it comes. Officially a drabble is supposed to be exactly 100 words in length, but most people tend to call anything 500 hundred or less a drabble, even if it’s wrong. Opposed to being a constraint, a drabble is a challenge to perfectly describe a thought with only necessary words. Flash fiction is between one and 500 words, so it has more leniency than a drabble but still requires careful word choice.

     Short-shorts are between 501 and 2,000 words traditionally (some people will insist the limit is 1,999, but it’s not worth the debate). Short stories are more complicated, the length varies depending on the publisher or competition. Generally they start at 2,000 words, and end somewhere between 5,000 and 7,500. Most college students and amateur writers will hover around the short story length, and tend to write more with more experience.

     Novelettes and novellas the in-between of long and short . Their difference is not really important, and no one should think that it is. In any circumstance where the difference actually does matter, the contest rules or publisher will probably specify what they want and call it whichever of the two they like best. Generally novelettes and novellas are between 7,500 and 40,000 words. Stories on the shorter side being considered novelettes and longer ones being novellas.

            The novel is also greatly varied depending on opinion and loose dictionary definitions like “a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity.” Generally there is an accepted word count definition for the length of a novel that begins between 40,000 and 50,000, and there is also a length that, according to my pen-pal Mr. Sloan, publishers prefer that is much higher. “There is a tendency in pro-level publishing to look in certain sizes first. 80,000 to 140,000 is the optimal size for a novel these days in a lot of genres -- and it runs cross genre.” He said, “The 40,000 word minimum novel is actually a puny, skinny paperback. Bundle two of them and you have a standard size 80,000 word book.”

            A quick walk through any library will also reveal that novel length tends to vary depending on genre as well, even if it is a mostly unspoken difference. Mysteries, at one end, tend to be thinner. Fantasies, at the other, tend to be the largest, sometimes cramming 180,000 words into a single book. Mr. Sloan, being a published writer of lengthy fantasies himself said “…120,000 words is a nice thick book like a typical Stephen King paperback. 180,000 starts to look bloated and pages fall out on the first read, it's one of those two inch doorstop ones.”

     Although the thought of 180,000 words or more is enough to make most of us faint, there is such a thing as an epic. Those are the books that have to be split into shorter novels and kept in boxed sets. That isn’t a goal writers should aim towards though. That’s just a length that some people write.

     Some people have the natural length of what Mr. Sloan calls “big fat novel” length, and like he does, do very well at it. Some people, like me, stick below 1,000 words, and produce good work with that too. And some people will vary every time they write a piece, which is also okay, as long as the words feel right.

     My pen-pal and had this to say when I explained to him the problem many young writers today face, and what he himself faced at the beginning of his writing career in the 50’s, “You'll always do your best writing at your natural length. It will always come easiest at that length, take less work and come out better. You can learn to do all the lengths, but by the time you do, you will know which one is your best. Do most of your writing in the length that's your strong point, because you can get it published where it belongs… So do your natural length and you'll always do your best.”

     No matter what length you write there is someone that will want it. You might write a single long, complete novel, or a compilation of short stories, or even drabbles or quotes. What’s important, and what we all need to concentrate on, is the potency of the writing itself.