The "Lengths" of Fiction

Short-Short Story:

A complete story of a few pages or less. "Short shorts" lack complex plots, detailed expositions, or character development but generally focus on a single memorable incident or powerful situation. (1)

A brief short story, usually no more than 2,000 words, sometimes with a surprise ending. Its best known practitioner was O. Henry. (3)

Flash Fiction:

(Also called Sudden Fiction.) A short story of less than a thousand words. This version of the short short story has recently become popular with American editors who prize its narrative intensity and poetic expressivity. (1)

Our conclusion, in the first Flash Fiction, was simply that they were very short stories. Granted, some of the stories seemed largely implied. Whatever they did -- whether they evoked a mood or provoked the intellect, introduced us to people we were interested to meet or described for us some unusual but understandable phenomena -- most depended for their success not on their length but on their depth, clarity of vision, and human significance. That was all we needed to know. As editors we were open to almost anything. However, this time we had a score of readers around the country helping us and we felt we needed more -- a key, some vital, crucial element about flash -- to guide them.

First we looked to length. Our minimum from a decade ago still seemed good. Not wanting to be too restrictive, we based this on a question: How short can a story be and still truly be a story? Some would say ideally as short as a sentence, but we found in practice anything less than a third of a page is likely to be a mere summary, or perhaps a joke. . . . For a maximum length, we kept to our original 750 words (the same as Hemingway's classic "A Very Short Story"), which had a practical basis, too -- to finish a flash fiction, you shouldn't have to turn the page more than once. (2)

Sudden Fiction:

If you are only now discovering sudden fiction and are wondering what it is, the answer is easy: very short stories, only a few pages long. . . . When we first began to see short-short fiction cropping up in literary magazines, we didn't know what they were or what to call them: Experimental fiction? Sketches? Prose poems? Anecdotes? Enigmas? One thing they were definitely not were little formula stories with an ironic twist at the end, the sort of O. Henry brand manufactured for popular magazines generations ago. These new works didn't end with a twist or a bang, but were suddenly just there, surprising, unpredictable, hilarious, serious, moving, in only a few pages. In fact, some were so short we wondered if they could be defined at all. . . . We decided to search for a distinction within the genre. Stories of only a page or two seemed to us different not only in length but in nature; they evoked a single moment, or an idea, whereas a five-page story, however experimental, was more akin to the traditional short story. Calling on the wisdom of Solomon, we split the child (sudden fiction) into two new children. The longer story became "new" sudden fiction, while the shorter became flash, named by James Thomas, editor of a volume called Flash Fiction. (4)

Short Story:

A prose narrative too brief to be published in a separate volume -- as novellas and novels frequently are. The short story is usually a focused narrative that presents one or two characters involved in a single compelling action. (1)

A short story is a relatively brief fictional narrative in prose. It may range in length from the short-short story of 500 words up to the “long-short story” of 12,000 to 15,000 words. It may be distinguished from the sketch and the tale in that it has a definite formal development, a firmness in construction. It finds its unity in many things other than plot -- although it often finds it there -- in effect, theme, character, tone, mood, and style. It may be distinguished from the novel in that it tends to reveal character through actions, the purpose of the story being accomplished when the reader comes to know what the true nature of a character is. The novel tends, on the other hand, to show character developing as a result of actions.

However natural and formless the short story may sometimes give the impression of being, a distinguishing characteristic of the genre is that it is consciously made and reveals itself to be the result of conscious, skilled work. Furthermore, however slight the short story may appear, it consists of more than a mere record of an incident or an anecdote. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end; it possesses at least the rudiments of plot. (3)

Nouvelle:

The French term for the short prose tale (called novella by Italian Renaissance writers) that usually depicted in relatively realistic terms illicit love, ingenious trickery, and sensational adventure, often with an underlying moral. Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron is a classic collection of nouvelle. (1)

A short novel or novelette; a work of fiction of intermediate length and complexity between the short story and the novel. Henry James used the French term nouvelle for short novel. (3)

Novella:

(Also called short novel.) In modern terms, a prose narrative that is longer than a short story but shorter than a novel (approximately 30,000 to 50,000 words). Unlike a short story, a novella is long enough to be published independently as a brief book. Classic modern novellas include Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. During the Renaissance, however, the term "novella" referred to much shorter stories such as the narratives that make up Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. (1)

A tale or short story. The term is particularly applied to the early tales of Italian and French writers -- such as the Decameron of Boccaccio and the Heptameron of Marguerite of Valois. The form interests students of English literature for two reasons: (1) Many of these early novelle were used by English writers as sources for their own work, and (2) it was from this form that the novel developed. Novella is also a term borrowed from the German and applied to the kind of short novel that developed in Germany in the nineteenth century. (3)

Novelette:

A work of prose fiction of intermediate length, longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. In general, the novelette displays the compact structure of the short story with the greater development of character, theme, and action of the novel. Melville’s Billy Budd, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, James’s The Turn of the Screw, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and William Styron's The Long March are examples. (3)

Short Novel:

A work of an intermediate length between the short story and the novel, roughly between 15,000 and 50,000 words. Where the short story is usually content to reveal a character through an action, to be what Joyce called an epiphany, the short novel is concerned with character development. Where the novel in its concern with character development employs a broad canvas, a number of characters, and frequently a long time span, the short novel concentrates on a limited cast of characters, a relatively short time span, and a single chain of events. Thus, it is an artistic attempt to combine the compression of the short story with the development of the novel. Although no one has ever formulated a wholly satisfactory definition of the short novel, it has had a distinctive history. Henry James, who did distinguished work in the form, called it "our ideal, the beautiful and blest nouvelle." Other writers who have found it an attractive form in which to work include: Stern, Melville, Tolstoi, Conrad, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Camus, Gide, Moravia, Wharton, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Woolf, Cather, Fitzgerald, and John O'Hara. (3)

Novel:

Novel is used in its broadest sense to designate any extended fictional narrative almost always in prose. In practice, however, its use is customarily restricted to narratives in which the representation of character occurs either in a static condition or in the process of development as the result of events or actions (see characterization). Often the term implies that some organizing principle -- plot, theme, or idea -- should be present in a narrative that is called a novel. The term novel is an English counterpart of the Italian novella, a short, compact, broadly realistic tale popular in the medieval period and best represented by those in the Decameron. In most European countries the word roman is used rather than novel, thus linking the novel with the older romance, of which, in a sense, the novel is an extension. (3)

Other Related Terms:

Anecdote

Fabliau

Sketch

Tale

Sources:

(1) The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia and R. S. Gwynn, New York: Longman, 2006.

(2) Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories, by James Thomas and Robert Shapard, New York: Norton, 2006.

(3) A Handbook to Literature, 9th edition, by William Harmon, Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2003.

(4) New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond, by Robert Shapard and James Thomas, New York: Norton, 2007.