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
17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity
17.7: Dissecting Influence
17.6: Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back
17.5: The Promise of the Brand
17.4: The Gun on the Mantel is Actually a Fish
17.3: Chekov’s Surprising Yet Inevitable Inverted Gun
17.2: It Was a Promise of Three Parts
17.1: Genre and Media are Promises
16.52: Structure is a Promise
16.51: Promises are a Structure
16.50: Worldbuilding Finale: Making Deliberate Choices
16.49: Magic and Technology: Two Sides of the Same Coin
16.48: Believable Worlds Part 2: Creating Texture
16.47: Believable Worlds Part 1: The Illusion of Real
16.46: World and Plot: The Only Constant is Change
16.45: World and Character Part 2: Moral Frame
16.44: World and Character Part 1: All Your Characters Are Biased
16.43: The Narrative Holy Trinity of World, Character, and Plot, with Fonda Lee
16.42: M.I.C.E. Quotient, After the Fact
16.41: Middles and Conflicts with M.I.C.E. Structure
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
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Pollyanna
The Adventure Zone
What if it’s True Podcast