Too Much and Never Enough
Avoid Falling Into the Gulf of Impossible-to-Sell Manuscripts
“Shall we play a game?”
—WOPR
I want to talk to you about this game I play all the time. No, not Among Us, though I can see why you would think that. It’s called “too much or not enough” and has to do with the nature of lines.
The overarching purpose of today’s Shelf Life is to answer a question I receive very often: “How do I know whether a concept I have is a novel or a short story or something in between?” I’m going to get there in a very roundabout way, which will surprise no one.
Lines exist but they don’t exist. A line is not a thing, but the absence of a thing. It is the boundary between two things but is not, itself, a thing. This is a concept I learned in art school, perhaps one of the only valuable concepts, another being, if you present a pile of garbage with the brazen and unearned confidence of a middle-class white person, you can convince just about anyone that what you’re showing them is art.
Ask me about the refrigerator box incident sometime.
A line in geometry, by definition, has length but does not have width. It is one-dimensional. You can’t draw a one-dimensional line. You can only draw a really, really skinny rectangle. Here is a human’s attempt to draw a line:
This line is not one-dimensional, because it has width. Although it’s as narrow as I could make it with a .38mm pen, for you to be able to see it, it must have width. This is not a line but a very disproportionate rectangle.
If you want to draw a true line, one that has length but not width, you have to do it like this:
The line is not the green part, nor the not-green part, but the part of the paper where it stops being green and starts being not-green (or vice versa). That’s where the line is. The line is the boundary between green and not-green, the part that I drew by omission. If you pull this trick out at a cocktail party I promise no one will ever know you didn’t go to art school.
My friend Maera said Shelf Life could use more illustrations so today’s article is dedicated to her. These are definitely the high-quality graphics you’ve all been wishing for.
The point is that lines exist conceptually but they don’t actually exist, like socialism and the color magenta. I apologize for spending so much Shelf Life Real Estate today on this concept but it’s important to the game of “too much or not enough.”
You can never be exactly on a line because a line has no width. If you want to be in the dead center of two things, right on the dividing line between them, I regret to inform you that you cannot. You will always be on one side or the other. You have a choice between:
Aiming to get as close to the center as you can and then falling where you fall; or
Making a deliberate choice to be on one or the other side of the line.
I think it’s always better to make a deliberate choice but not everybody feels that way. Your mileage may vary. It’s fine. Live free or don’t.
When I get up in the morning and I’m getting dressed and putting on accessories and shoes and makeup and everything else, I am always cognizant of where the line is, the line between “not enough” and “too much,” which represents “Exactly the Right Amount.” I know I cannot feasibly be right on that line and I have to make a choice between “too much” and “not enough,” which then forms the basis of the game. If you have ever met me for even one single second then you know I strongly prefer “too much.” I don’t play by “The Price Is Right” rules. Go big or go home.
Go big and then go home. Lay on the sofa. Stare at the ceiling. You’ve earned it.
When it comes to figuring out how much volume of content your concept or idea is going to generate, the common wisdom that everybody tells you is: “Write till you’ve told the whole story and then see what you have!”
My patent-pending Shelf Life advice formula is: (1) Tell you the advice everyone else gives; (2) Declare that is terrible advice and explain why; (3) Give you my own (obviously better) advice. Today I deviate from my usual formula because “write till you’ve told the whole story” is not terrible advice. It’s fine. It just doesn’t answer the question you asked, which is: “Hey, how can I tell if I’ve got a short story on my hands or a seven-book series or something in between?”
This is challenging for me to explain because the moment I have an idea for something to write I know exactly how much content it’s going to generate. I know right away whether the concept—if I see it through to its natural end result—will yield a novel-length manuscript or a short story, and generally I can nail it down to the approximate word count. I can do this with almost everything I write, with one exception. It is an incredibly handy skill because it makes work planning a breeze but, unfortunately, I had no idea how I do it.
(The exception is Shelf Life articles, which unfailingly come out exactly twice as long as intended and must be cut.)
The reason the length of your work matters is that many of us who write want to sell what we have written. I say “sell” and not “publish” because today I am not talking about self-publishing your work. You can self-publish anything. I see a lot of folks in the writers’ groups I frequent wanting to know if they can put their 17,000-word novelette on KDP and sell it—look, you can do whatever you want. Whether people will buy it is another story. Consumers, too, can do whatever they want.
The fact is, if you’re looking to sell your writing, there are way more people and outlets buying short stories and novels than there are buying novelettes and novellas. Most of what you see for sale in a bookstore—online or brick-and-mortar—are book-length works (either longform writing or book-length compilations of short-form writing). Most of what you see in magazines and literary journals are short-length works like short stories and flash fiction. You don’t see a whole ton of “in-between.”
There are bindery and shelving considerations that play into it but we don’t need to get into all that right now. It’s just harder to find someone to buy a manuscript if you’ve got “too much” (for a short story) or “not enough” (for a novel).
Sitting down and telling the whole story you have to tell until it’s complete and then seeing what you’ve got is all well and good unless, for instance, you don’t want to spend time working on something that’s going to peter out at 17,000 words, too long to sell to a journal and too short to sell to a publisher of books.
Some people write for the experience of telling a story and that’s great. Some people write to earn money and that’s also great. Neither is more noble or pure or better than the other. If you earn your living writing, or want to, you might prefer not to use your time writing something that will be hard to sell.
As I said, I didn’t know how I did it. Good news for you: I do this thing where I lay on the sofa and stare at the ceiling while I figure stuff out so I went and did that for a few hours and now I know how I do it. My partner probably thinks I’m depressed. Spoiler alert, I am depressed. I’m “The Most High-Functioning Depressed Person™” my therapist in Thousand Oaks, CA, has ever met. That’s on my resume. (That is not on my resume.)
In the case of manuscript length, we’re not dealing with a line between short stories and novels. There’s a vast chasm in between: The Gulf of Tough-to-Sell Manuscripts. Generally speaking, you will need to be under 7,500 words for a short story and you will need to be over 40,000 for even the shortest full-length novel. Anything in between is going to be very challenging to sell. Although novellas seem to be gaining traction in the market; a thought to explore another day.
Concepts come to me in all kinds of ways. They come in dreams, they grow out of interest in a word or phrase I have heard, I develop them from what-if type questions, sometimes they are inspired by real events. Sometimes a very complicated concept comes to me all in a dream, sometimes something I develop over a long period of time is very simple. There’s no rhyme or reason. Once, I wrote a 5,000-word short story that follows a family for three generations. Once, I wrote a 70,000-word novel that takes place in the course of a week. Ulysses is more than 250,000 words and spans twenty-four hours. The time period that your story covers is not the answer.
I keep a list of my ten favorite short stories from the last 100 years—which unfortunately Ryūnosuke Akutagawa is about to age off of in January—and I considered all ten in writing this article, as well as examining twenty of my own writing projects (a mix of novel- and short-story-length works) to see if they fit the mold and I am fairly confident I have cracked it.
A short story will follow this rule of three ones:
You can ingest or think through the whole idea in one sitting.
It explores one theme.
It evokes one mood in the reader.
It might cover one incident, it might cover a lifetime of incidents, but either way if your story is using the incidents to explore a single theme or idea, then it is probably a short story. If your intent is to leave the reader with a single important thought, revelation, or impression, then your concept is probably a short story. If you can lay down on the sofa and stare at the ceiling and start thinking through your concept and get through the whole thing in one go without your mind drifting away to something else, or falling asleep, or having to get up to get water or go to the bathroom, then your concept is probably a short story.
A longer work, on the other hand:
Takes more than one sitting to ingest or think through. While you could summarize a novel more quickly than that, you probably won’t be able to think through (or verbally explain) all of the important elements in one go.
Pro-tip: If you can explain your concept succinctly to another person without sounding like you are crazy, it’s probably a short story.
Explores multiple themes.
If you find yourself saying something like, “well, I want to explore the theme of balancing companionship with independence, and also the struggle for individuality versus the need to embrace the society in which we live—” then what you are writing is never gonna fit in a short story.
Guides the reader through multiple moods.
If you read any short story—any short story at all—you’re probably going to come away from it feeling one way. Longer work will not leave you feeling just one thing. They have happy parts and sad parts and stressful parts and more relaxing parts and payoffs and gratification and cliffhangers. A short story throws everything it has at creating one mood.
Okay, so now we know how to establish whether you have a short story or something longer than a short story. That is part one. If the answer is “no, I have something longer and more complicated than a short story”—how do you figure out whether you have a novel’s worth of content versus a novella or a novelette?
This is tougher. A short story is a distinct art form and not a shorter novel. A novelette and a novella, on the other hand, are essentially shorter novels. The distinctions between novelette, novella, and novel are blurrier.
To quantify it, a novelette is usually considered anything from 7,501 to 19,000 words and a novella is usually considered 19,001 to 39,999 words. Obviously, the line between these forms is like the line in my elegant artwork above: It is the point where something stops being a novelette and starts being a novella. For practical purposes, though, what you need to know is whether your idea is going to fill a salable amount of manuscript.
Apply the movie test. Here’s the science of how long stuff takes:
The average American adult reads somewhere between 200 and 265 words per minute.
If one can read 200 to 265 words per minute, they can read about 18,000 to 23,850 words in ninety minutes; or 24,000 to 31,800 words in two hours.
Feature films run, on average, ninety minutes to two hours.
Therefore, a novelette or novella takes about as long to read as a movie takes to watch. A full-fledged novel will take more time for the average American adult to read than it takes them to watch a movie. A novelette or novella will contain about the same number of events as you would expect to see in a movie. This is why the most faithful movie adaptations come from novellas, like The Shawshank Redemption. You can include everything that matters because there’s “runtime” parity.
Could your story fit comfortably into a feature film without cutting important plot points or subplots or omitting characters? Probably a novella at most. Are you going to have to option it as a Netflix series because there’s way too much to contain in one film? Congrats, you’re sitting on a novel.
This is why I like it when I get asked questions like these—“How do I know if my concept is a short story or a novel or something in between?” When someone asks a question that I know the answer to, it’s great. When someone asks me a question I don’t know the answer to, it’s even better because figuring stuff out is the best. You may have a different experience, but this is how I’ve been doing it—without knowing how I was doing it—and my track record has been pretty good. I invite you to try and if you discover I’m wrong, I hope you will come back and let me know.
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