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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19.01: Interview with Abraham Verghese
18.53: Funding the Writing Life
18.52: Writing Inside The Box
18.51: So You Wanna Play With Format?
18.50: The Unreliable Narrator
18.49: Giving Your Story A Voice
18.48: NaNoWriMo Week 5 - Writing Endings
18.47: NaNoWriMo Week 4 - Climaxes, or OH MY GOD NO
18.46: NaNoWriMo Week 3 - Raising the Stakes
18.45: NaNoWriMo Week 2 - Inciting Incident
18.44: NaNoWriMo Week 1- Getting Started
18.43: Worldbuilding in Miniature
18.42: Creating Magic Outside of a System
18.41: Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza
18.40: How To Make Money From Your Hobby (with special guest Sandra Tayler!)
18.39: How To Write An Ending
18.38: How Do You Write A Series With Books That Stand Alone?
18.37: Mandatory Failure
18.36: The Soggy Middle Pays the Rent (or, "Stand Alone With Series Potential")
18.35: How to Organize Your Writing, or Managing the Mega-Arc
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