Emerging Writers Network

Novella Month - Definition by Andrew Ervin

Seeing as I bailed early on (as in, during my first post) in explaining what exactly a novella is, the fine author, Andrew Ervin, has come to the rescue with his explanation--I'm hoping this is the first of many of these this month.

What is a novella? I have no idea. But I think it has something to do with now outdated methods of commercial categorization. Let me step back from the question a tiny bit.

I don’t believe in genre. Anyone who has ever attempted to organize a compact disc collection will know what I mean. Where do you put Sinatra? With the Jazz? The Pop Music? He would seem to fit more at home with The Beatles than John Coltrane, but, then again, he might be easier to find if he’s near Count Basie and not Radiohead. And Radiohead at their best shares some aesthetic sensibilities with Messiaen and maybe even Ligeti, who are hanging out over in Classical. These categories—Classical, Jazz, Pop—are artificial constructs imposed upon the art to turn them into commercial products we could easily locate at Borders. Little wonder that that excluded-middle model—a product is either x or y—has bankrupted retailers and been replaced by systems of information architecture and information retrieval (to borrow the wonderful term from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil) by which an iPod can use multiple criteria, not solely genre, which is artificial anyway, to locate Brad Mehldau’s cover version of “Paranoid Android.”

You see where I’m going here. The label “novella” is not inherent in the work of art; it’s a sticker publishers and editors place on the outside of it so that consumers can find it. Art and commerce have always been uneasy bedfellows, but they manage to get along because they have to. Personally, I’ve never set out to write a novella for the sake of writing a novella. In Extraordinary Renditions, I had three stories I wanted to tell and that form (again, which fairly or not has a kind of anti-commercial reputation) suited the thematic concerns. Had “The Empty Chairs” or “Brooking the Devil” required ten pages or a thousand pages to get the story across, that’s how long I would have made them and it would have been an entirely different kind of book.

  Fortunately, many publishers are beginning to see the limitations of the current model. More houses are publishing novellas these days, which warms the cockles of my heart. Maybe the emergence of e-readers will further revitalize the novella; it feels like the perfect length for reading on a screen. We may see yet another beautiful example of technology opening up the field of what’s commercially viable for writers. As for my own work, and maybe this will change one day soon, I’m not sure that commercial viability would even crack the top ten list of what I want to accomplish on the page. If it did, I probably would not have written novellas.

Andrew Ervin is the author of Extraordinary Renditions (Coffee House Press) and is a great reviewer of books, as well as all-around good guy (I penned this, not Andrew).

Novella Month - Preparations for Search by Joseph McElroy

I'm always a little lost in the wilderness when it comes to just what exactly is a novella. Two years ago I had a few authors that had published novellas give me their definitions but I'm afraid they were mostly a little too smart for me. I know I don't simply believe it's a word or page count. I think there's something that differentiates a novella from a long short story, and from a short novel as well--I just don't know what exactly that is.

A long-winded introduction to say that I'm not fully sure that Joseph McElroy's Preparations for Search is a novella, but it feels like it to me. Originally this material was a portion of McElroy's novel, Women and Men, that was removed. He published it rather quietly in the journal Formations in 1984. Small Anchor Press then published it as a square-bound book with some slight revisions to the text that sold out rather quickly. It has recently been published in eBook form by Dzanc Books in their rEprint Series with an introduction by Mike Heppner.

From this introduction:

In conversation with Joseph McElroy, I once described his short novel Preparations for Search in genre terms as "noir-core," in which the conventions of noir are flattened and compressed into dense, jet-black space, a gravitational singularity...There's a sense of noir in Preparations for Search as well, "noir" as defined by George Tuttle as a subcategory of hardboiled detective fiction in which "the protagonist is usually not a detective, but instead either a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator"...One could say that McElroy, in both his novels and short fiction, invites us to become sleuths as we plunder, decode, hypothesize about and interrogate his information-rich narratives. But what makes Preparations for Search "noir-core" is McElroy's approach to tempo and tone. Here the prose is so tightly wound—the pace accelerated to two-hundred beats-per-minute—that what we're left with is the structural essence of noir without the flabby clichés.

An example of McElroy's writing, Preparations for Search begins:

     It was only money, but it was quite a lot of money and I told him I felt I couldn't let him have it. Enos said he could understand. I said what he did with the money was his business, but--eleven hundred dollars to pay a detective to track down someone Enos hadn't seen since he was two? He looked me in the eye and asked if it was true that what he did with the money was his business. "What money?" I said, and he laughed and said didn't I mean whose money?

And so it begins. That last line of what I've quoted of Heppner's introduction perfectly describes McElroy's work here. The pace of the book does accelerate with the lack of excess, or cliche, that one might expect from a more standard work. It allows for a quick read, which to be honest I was very happy for as I actually immediately went back to the start to read it again as the prose is not just accelerated but simply lovely. There's a rhythm to it, a flow that is fascinating. It has me more than ready to tackle the slightly over 1000 page long Women and Men--but that will be after Novella Month is over.

 

Novella Month

Two years ago, the EWN celebrated Novella Month in June hot on the heels of year four (I think) of Short Story Month. Last year, not so much. This year, it's been revived as Deena Drewis over at the wonderful Nouvella, has got things moving--the logo is stolen from their site.

I'm looking forward to reading, discussing, reviewing, etc. some novellas, some publishers that concentrate on novellas, and more.

On twitter, look for #novellamonth

Novella Month - Definition (anti?) - Peter Markus

I'm not sure I know, Dan, what makes a novella a novella, or what makes a novel a novel, or a poem a poem or a story a story. What I do know, or what I think I know, is what makes a sentence an invigorating, sensation-giving, living, breathing sentence. When a writer is able to string together enough of those kinds of sentences in some sort of sequence, I might be willing to claim that what we then have on our hands is what most people might safely refer to as a story. When a writer is able to sustain such a sequence of sentences over a length of time on the page that might stretch out beyond more than a handful of pages (or fifty or seventy-five pages) I suppose we have to call what those sentences make a longer story, or a novella. I'm sure folks like John Gardner and other literary smarty-pants have more rigid ideas to lean their elbows on so I'll leave that sort of definition-making to folks more schooled in these sorts of things than I am or will ever claim to be. 

It's true that I've written three such pieces—in recent issues of Black Warrior Review and Unsaid— that have stretched out beyond the page-limits of what might be seen as a conventionally-lengthed short work of fiction, though in each case they each did so without my intention for them to do so having anything to do with how far the sentences within were willing to take me. I am always simply taken, in all instances when I am lucky enough to be inside the writing of a piece of fiction, and I allow myself, when I can, to be taken and to ride those sentences for as long as they might have me as a tagger-along.

Peter Markus is the author of four books:  Good, Brother, The Moon is a Lighthouse, The Singing Fish, and Bob, or Man on Boat.  His next book, We Make Mud, is due out from Dzanc Books in March 2011.

Novella Month - Definition - Steve Stern

Look forward to much more about this man on this blog in the near future, in July we'll have something akin to what we did with Percival Everett last year.

Here's an analogy: If a short story is a doll's house and a novel is a rambling abode of many mansions, which you may enter and explore at your leisure, then the novella is a modest structure--say, a cottage--whose occupants you're forced to spy upon through its windows.  So what if the novella denies you the primary intimacy with its characters that a novel affords; it enhances your awareness of the mystery of their movements, the allusiveness of their speech, while at the same time preserving your appreciation for the beautiful symmetry of the structure that contains them.

Steve Stern, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, is the author of several previous novels and novellas.  He teaches at Skidmore College in upstate New York.  His most recent novel, The Frozen Rabbi, was just published last month by Algonquin.

Novella Month - Definition - Sasha Fletcher

A novella is the thing that is not entirely a novel. It is the thing that picks up where the long story lets off. A long story being longer than a short story. There are all kinds of word counts we can use for precision, but a novella is more about intent. We can probably best think about the novella as an effort to sprawl out within a confined space. We can look at it as being the ideal space for a certain kind of notion to take root. Like a venue for performance. Like how some bands just don't translate well to the stadium but might be perfect for a high school gym. The Velvet Underground played high school gyms. They were pretty neat.

Sasha Fletcher (editor's note - this is simple and  by me - can't track down my copy of his novella) is the author of the novella When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets and We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds (Musluscious Press 2010).

Novella Month - Looking for One? Under the Small Lights by John Cotter

This one is in my TBR pile still, but with fantastic blurbs from Dzanc authors Laura van den Berg and Josh Russell, and the fact that it was the co-winner of the 2009 Miami University Press Novella Contest (plus a sneak peek inside the covers) tells me I'm looking forward to it.

“John Cotter’s prose is lyric, his images unforgettable, his characters richly complicated. From the first sentence to the last, I was captivated by this story and the characters that call out to the reader with mystery and beauty and terror, like voices in the night. Under the Small Lights is a book to be savored, and John Cotter is an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“John Cotter’s Under the Small Lights is the kind of book I always look for and rarely find: a mellow meditation on friendship and romance and the romance of friendship told in prose straightforward and lovely. His characters are urbane and articulate, foolishly impulsive, and heartbreakingly earnest. It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered a bildungsroman this successful, let alone a novella this bighearted.”
—Josh Russell, author of Yellow Jack and My Bright Midnight

Novella Month - Definition - Michael Griffith

I guess my definition of a novella would be that it's a narrative of an awkward length . . . a length so inimical to commercial publishing that the writer is free to take big formal risks and imaginative leaps, to attempt whatever weirdness s/he dares without fear of making the novella unsellable. Unsellability was, after all, part of the premise and the point, and no thought of the marketplace and its compromises ever need intrude. I also like the freedom that the novella's hybridity brings, the opportunity to negotiate between the tight focus of the story and the expansiveness of the novel.

Michael Griffith is the author of Spikes (Arcade Publishing 2001) and Bibliophilia: A Novella and Other Stories (Arcade Publishing 2003), as well as the Series Editor of LSU's Yellow Shoe Fiction Series (ed. note - read all of these, Michael edits as well as he writes!).

Novella Month - Definition - Michael Mejia

Who asks the question "What is a novella?" And why? The common approach of defining the novella by word count or page length may seem adequate enough for an editor or publisher concerned about space in a journal or marketability. And those same concerns may be relevant to the writer, as well, after or during the writing. The reader, too, may make a decision to invest based on her sense of her available time, or whether or not a work breaks the 100 page mark, signifying, maybe, the presence or absence of depth. I'm more interested in the writer's choice to write a novella. Does anyone actually do this anymore? Or is it always an accident? "Oops, it's a novella. Damn." That was my experience with my novella, "Report of Ito Sadohara, Head of Tuna, Uokai, Ltd., to the Ministry of Commerce, Regarding Recent Events in the Domestic Fishing Industry" (published in Agni). I went into the writing with the notion of abandoning the boundary of page length, and I didn't think about what a novella was until the piece felt only half done at 40 pages. Length mattered then. Content (its relationship to the nature of the novella), not so much. But further research has revealed to me much deeper affinities between this work and the qualities of the novella that continue to interest me the most.

 

In his introduction to The Granta Book of the American Long Story, Richard Ford writes that he thinks it unlikely contemporary American writers would spend time defining the novella because "no one would choose to wall-in his imagination that way merely to prove a point extrinsic, even irrelevant to the act of writing." Now, I'd agree with not wanting to overdetermine the content or structural features of the novella, or of any genre. But it seems to me that the etymological and literary histories of the novella have always embraced qualities that are, in fact, entirely intrinsic to the act of writing. And it’s these common (though maybe not universal) qualities that more recently have fed my interest in the novella as a writer, in choosing the novella.

 

I've become rather fond of the cloud of ideas that formed around Goethe's 1827 definition (posed as a question to Eckermann): "What is a novella but an unprecedented happening that has actually occurred?" The context of this question is Goethe's explanation of his choice of Novella (Die Novelle) as the title for his final novella. By that point, he had been thinking about the genre since at least the 1790s, when he began work on Conversations of German Refugees, an ultimately unfinished project modeled on Boccaccio's Decameron, the generally accepted origin of the novella. While Novella is a free-standing work (it amounts to 15 fairly dense pages in the Suhrkamp Collected Works), German Refugees follows Boccaccio in its use of a cornice, or frame story, in which we're introduced to a group of people sitting around telling stories to each other while waiting out a catastrophe. (For Goethe's aristocratic characters, the catastrophe is the invasion of Germany by the French Revolutionary Army.) All this to say that, while length has always been a relevant feature of the novella, what has been more significant in defining the novella (at least in Europe, where it's enjoyed a more celebrated life), and what I hope will remain at the forefront of contemporary discussions of the novella, is the specific nature of its content and its relationship to the reader.

 

To have its greatest effect, the novella's unprecedented happening must occur against an uncontested background, and in Goethe's time, this background was usually a seemingly transparent, bourgeois Reality. The novella dwells not so much on the unprecedented happening, but on its effect on the work's characters, who are, like the reader, deeply invested in maintaining the stability of their assumptions about the world. The unprecedented event draws our attention to Reality, reminding us that Reality is a construction, and highlighting forgotten fractures and ellipses through which other realities might be visible. The novella describes the struggle (the characters', the reader's) to normalize these troubling ambiguities. Sometimes order is restored, but in my favorite works (I'm partial to Kleist), mysteries remain. A stranger world lies just out of reach.

 

Kafka's The Metamorphosis illustrates an approach that I favor as a writer and reader of contemporary novellas, an approach that, in my mind, engages with the essential exploratory and innovative nature of writing. Gregor Samsa awakes from uneasy dreams to find himself changed into a monstrous vermin, but, even before this incredible shock (a shock really more for the reader than Gregor, strangely), the reality of the world in which he went to sleep the night before has already drifted free of our world, the reader's reality. Every aspect of the novella is now unprecedented, and we can't take full pleasure in the work if we hold on to our perception of our reality as an invariable measure, as Reality, if we don't concede that our struggle is an element of the work. Denied any assumptions about Gregor's world, we are both struck with wonder at its unfolding possibilities and prodded to creatively re-evaluate the possibilities of our own reality. In this same tradition, we find Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Stanley Crawford's Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, David Ohle's Motorman, and Diane Williams' The Stupefaction. All of these, and others, fit into that certain, ambiguous range of words or pages we want to assign to the novella, and they have that certain narrative mass that feels greater than a story, not so great as a novel. But more importantly they extend the dimensions of the unprecedented and engage the reader's wonder in compelling ways that, for me, seem distinctly novellistic.

Michael Mejia is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the NEA and a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. His novel Forgetfulness was published by FC 2, and his fiction, nonfiction, and book reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Paul Revere's Horse, Notre Dame Review, Seneca Review, Esquire online, New Orleans Review, and American Book Review, among others.

Novella Month - Your Favorite?

A question maybe I could have asked before the 20th of the month - what is your favorite novella?  Also, have you read any new novellas this month yet?