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
Sign up for our newsletter:
https://writingexcuses.com
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.
Join Our Writing Community!
Patreon
YouTube
18.15: Building a Mystery, Now With More Tools
18.14: Heavy Lifting with Microtension
18.13: Finding the Core Conflict
18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions
18.11: Turning Up the Contrast With Juxtaposition
18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait
18.09: Unpacking the Tension
18.08: Building a Mystery
18.07: Deep Dive into THE SPARE MAN
18.06: An Interview With Howard Tayler
18.05: An Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal
18.04: An Interview With Dan Wells
18.03: An Interview With Erin Roberts
18.02: An Interview with DongWon Song
18.01: Twenty Twenty-Three, By Way of Introduction
17.52: The WXR 2022 Q&A
17.51: Feel The Burn
17.50: Consistency, Inconsistency, and the Crushing Weight of Expectations
17.49: Bodies Are Magical
17.48: Bodies, Why? (Part III)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Museum of the Missing
Moments In Time And Space
TELL ME A STORY: THE TRUE LIFE OF JAKOB STANLEY
Anne of Avonlea
Frankenstein
The Adventure Zone
Middle Aged and Creeped Out