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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17.27: Ensembles Behind the Scenes
17.26: Hanging Separately
17.25: Archetypes, Ensembles, and Expectations
17.24: Ensembles and Genre
17.23: Are We Stronger Together?
17.22: Establishing the Ensemble
17.21: Casting Your Story With Character Voice
17.20: Basics of Ensemble Characterization
17.19: Working in a Collaborative Environment
17.18: How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye
17.17: Writing in the Public Domain
17.16: Miscellaneous Structures
17.15: Storytelling in the Footnotes
17.14: Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order
17.13: Structuring Around a Thing
17.12: Structuring a Story Within a Story
17.11: Structuring with Multiple Timelines
17.10: Structuring with Multiple POVs
17.9: Let’s Talk About Structure
17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity
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