How do you find the right size for your story? And speaking of size, what do novellas do differently than both short stories and novels? What even is the difference between a novel and a novella? How many characters do they usually have? How many subplots? How do you know if your story should take the form of a novella or a novel? We dive into all these questions (and…you guessed it… more!) in our conversation.
A note on the structure of Season 19: in between our close reading series (six episodes where we dive into an element of craft through a close reading of a specific text), we’ll be doing two wild card episodes! These episodes are random topics that our hosts have been wanting to tell you about, we just didn’t know where they fit. So we MADE a place for them to fit!
Thing of the Week:
Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall (a collaborative, storytelling-based RPG)
Homework:
Take a short story that you either love or have written and write a list of things that could be added to expand it to novella length. Now do the same for a novel, but make it a list of things that might need to be cut.
A Reminder!
That starting May 12th, we'll be focusing on Worldbuilding and reading A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. If you’re going to buy this book, we have this bookshop link available for you to do so! (If not, go support your local library!) https://bookshop.org/lists/close-readings-season-19
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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar, Mary Robinette Kowal, and DongWon Song. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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15.52: Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts in Just a Very Few Words Which Must Fit In A Very Very Small Box, With Patrick Rothfuss
15.51: Feedback—When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with special guest Mahtab Narsimhan
15.50: Juggling Ensembles
15.49: Maintaining Passion for a Story, with special guest Mahtab Narsimhan
15.48: Deliberate Discomfort, Part Two
15.47: Worldbuilding Science Fiction, with Cory Doctorow
15.46: Crafting Chinese-American Characters
15.45: Worldbuilding Fantasy, with Patrick Rothfuss
15.44: Rebooting a Career
15.43: Audiobook Narration, with Bruce D Richardson
15.42: Writing The End
15.41: Researching the FCK out of Things, with Cory Doctorow
15.40: Researching for Writing the Other
15.39: Translation, with special guest Alex Shvartsman
15.38: Depicting Religions That Are Not Your Own
15.37: Writing Under Deadlines
15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale
15.35: Tools for Writing and Worldbuilding, with Erin Roberts
15.34: Writing Deliberate Discomfort
15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul
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