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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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
18.34: Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing
18.33.5: State Of The Podcast
18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale
18.32: The Kirsten Vangsness Expansion Pack
18.31: Getting Personal: Mining Your Life for Themes
18.30: Planting Supernatural Seeds
18.29: Collaboration And Partnership
18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue
18.27: Framing Stories
18.26: Broadening Your Writing Wheelhouse: Video Game Dialogue, RPG Adventures, & More
18.25: To Narrator or Not to Narrator
18.24: “Dark One: Forgotten” Deep Dive
18.23: Our Advice on Giving Advice
18.22: On Mentorship: Sending the Elevator Back Down
18.21: The Empathy Gap: How to Understand What Your Publisher is Telling You
18.20: So You Want To Work In Publishing?
18.19: What is Publishing For, Anyway?
18.18: Launching an Author Newsletter
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