The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

The practice of fiction
159
Novella
Some new writers choose the novella form to find their voice before writing a full-length novel, gathering maybe three or four novellas together between one cover as a means of setting out their stall. A novella is a short novel, commonly fifty to a hundred pages long. This allows greater character and theme development than a short story, without the intricate structural exigencies or the
Niagaran tightrope walk of a novel. It offers the concentration of a short story and the wider compass of the novel’s form. Some critics have imposed a word count on where the novella stops and a novel begins. Thinking about numbers is counterproductive when writing a novella – an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic, as Stephen King calls the form – although words seems a sensible target fora new writer.
Novellas are similar in structure to short stories, in that they often open with an event, but may then move backwards in time to give background material.
They also frequently place a change of direction, such as a reversal of fortune or anew event, within the rising action. Again, it is wise to read, then imitate, aspects of some of the most numinous models, such as Henry James’s The Beast in the
Jungle (NA2: 524) and The Turn of the Screw (1898); Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness (NE2: 1958); Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915); Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925); Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912); George
Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945); Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Caf´e
(1951); Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and Anthony Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange (1962).
Novel
It is as useless to define a novel by its length – there are trilogies and tetralogies as to define a mountain by its height, but the new writer is looking at an extended prose narrative with a great deal more characters, varied scenes and a more openhanded coverage of time. In such a longer form dramatic structure is almost certainly a mark of the voice, and the new writer should play safe with that structure in their first efforts. Like bouldering in the Alps before hitting the Himalayas, some novelists write two or three short trial novels before they attempt their first novel. What is imperative is to keep at it, getting the first draft down as fast as possible, and not leaving the room in Ron Carlson’s phrase.
I make no recommendations as to reading, since it is extremely unlikely that your wish to write a novel is not already based on reading hundreds of them.
As we discussed in Chapter
One
, how can we know what is genuinely new unless we are familiar with what has gone before Many would-be novelists

160
Creative writing
suppose that the novel form is fully explored. Fora beginning novelist, a challenge would be to take up one of Milan Kundera’s four appeals in The Art of
the Novel. Kundera argues for the creation of novels that explore what he calls
‘missed opportunities in the genre’s history, such as playfulness the fusion of dream and reality the novel as a vehicle for philosophical thought and the enigma of collective time, a novel that attempts to overstep the limits of a temporal life (2000: 15). We explored some of these ways of thinking about writing in the first five chapters. The point is that there are still many open spaces.
‘The literary novel is, of course, a prickly term, used to distinguish it from commercial or genre novels (such as science/detective/horror). Its qualities include psychological depth, subtle characterisation and attentiveness to style.
It denotes seriousness and profundity to some readers and critics it can also seem slightly po-faced to others. I suspect that most of us enjoy a story, and that story is one of the things that drew you to reading and writing as a child. That does not mean plot and narrative are put aside as childish things. Let us be clear:
because a novel is popular, it does not follow that it is junk. About teaching and learning to write fiction, John Gardner contends in The Art of Fiction, what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well (
1983
: x. Think about these issues, but then forget them while you write (but less so while you are rewriting. Do not let any of these matters intimidate or skew the way you write a novel. The only way forward is to write for yourself. One thing you will begin to recognise in fiction is that, although worldly experience can be drawn upon to make setting, character and scene believable, you will write more easily using your own imagination, especially if that imagination is fired up through research. Find things out, or imagine them, and afterwards check your facts. But trust in your own judgement at first – do not get hung upon reality. It is astonishing how much you will get right (say, with setting) by simply following your nose and by reading upon the subject. Fiction’s predictive power comes from this ravelling of intuition and research.

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