Novella or Short Novel? The Middle Form You Can Actually Finish in November

A Naples-London flight, at cruising altitude. Beneath the wing, a stretch of flat cloud, white as fresh plaster. The cabin smells of warm plastic and instant coffee, and the drone of the engines wipes out any sense of time. I've got the tray table down. There's no laptop on it: there's a slim book, rough cover, ivory-coloured paper.

A direct flight between Naples and London takes about two hours fifty minutes on average: depending on the airport and the wind, anywhere between two and a half and three hours. An adult reading fiction silently manages roughly 260 words a minute: that's the average researcher Marc Brysbaert pulled from 190 studies in 2019, and it refers to English. At that pace Lettere dal cielo, which runs to about 29,000 words, takes one hour fifty-two minutes. A novella at the top of the scale, 40,000 words, takes two hours thirty-four. The book is finished before the wheels touch the runway.

This isn't just a traveller's curiosity. In 1842 Edgar Allan Poe, reviewing Hawthorne's tales, set the yardstick for fiction read in one go: half an hour to an hour or two. Beyond that, he argued, reading gets interrupted and the single effect is lost; that's why he looked at the novel with suspicion. A novella sits right on the edge of that window. In London in 2008, Meike Ziervogel founded Peirene Press on a twin rule: books under two hundred pages, to be read in the time it takes to watch a film. The Times Literary Supplement described them as two-hour books, to be devoured in a single sitting.

The question that remains is a simple one, and hardly anyone settles it with numbers: how long does a novella need to be so that it's neither a stretched short story nor a novel with its legs cut off? Here you'll find the numbers, the real cases, a method and a plan for the twenty-two days left in November.

The Middle Form

Middle distance

In How to choose the first book to write I'd put the novel among the marathons and the short story collection among the sprints. One distance was missing: middle distance, the eight hundred and fifteen hundred metres. You can't pace yourself like a long-distance runner, and you can't burn everything in the first twenty seconds like a sprinter. I dealt with the sprint of writing in Five hundred words to make a film in the reader's head: flash fiction, with its steps below 2,000 words. The novella is the stretch that comes next.

AI-generated image

The full scale

From 1,500 words upwards, the scale looks like this.

I work out standard pages and character counts using the equivalences from A novel in a month: the outline matters more than the words: 250-280 words per standard page, 6.5-7 characters per word. Reading times are estimates at 260 words a minute, a figure for English: for Italian, treat them as a rough order of magnitude.

Award thresholds, market expectations

The thresholds in the table are those of the Hugo and Nebula awards: a novella is between 17,500 and just under 40,000 words, a novel is 40,000 and over. They're award conventions, not laws, and there's a second gap. Someone buying a novel expects far more than 40,000 words: between 70,000 and 100,000, depending on genre. A book of 45,000 is technically a novel and will strike a lot of readers as a bit thin.

The rule of thumb among editors is a different one: a novella can carry one main plot and one subplot, or two points of view looking at the same event. A novelette can carry only one.

A false friend

In Italian, "novella" is a false friend. Say it to an editor and school memory runs straight to the Decameron: a hundred novelle, ie a hundred short stories, which Boccaccio wrote between 1348 and 1353 after spending his youth in Naples, from 1327 to roughly 1340. In the English-speaking world novella means something else: what in Italian we call a romanzo breve. French plays the same trick with nouvelle, which is a short story. That's why the title carries both words.

Even the big names' labels are slippery. Henry James, in the prefaces to the New York Edition (1907-1909), calls "the beautiful and blest nouvelle" the ideal length that other languages, with Turgenev, Balzac and Maupassant, had already cultivated. Claire Keegan describes Foster, from 2010, as a "long short story".

Why you don't measure it in pages

The page is a typographical illusion. Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald runs to 132 pages in the first edition, 141 in an American one, 181 or 208 in others: same text. Lettere dal cielo has 162 pages and about 29,000 words, so roughly 179 words a page: format and line spacing decide. For an Italian publisher what counts is the standard page: using the equivalences above, 29,000 words come to 104-116 standard pages, about 188,500-203,000 characters. Write in words and convert at the end.

Two ways of getting the size wrong

There are two mirror-image ways to get it wrong.

The first is the padded short story: an idea worth ten pages that has to become a little volume. The author stretches it: landscapes that move nothing, dialogues that repeat the same clash in different words. The test is brutal: delete a central scene. If the story stands up just the same, it was air.

The second is the squashed novel: twelve characters, three generations, five subplots, and the shears cutting everything down to stumps. What comes out is a summary, where events race along and no scene has time to become smell, weight, voice.

A Neapolitan tailor doesn't shorten a double-breasted jacket by chopping twenty centimetres off the bottom: he redesigns shoulders, lapels, buttons. A novella needs a design of its own.

Why November

November brings NaNoWriMo with it: fifty thousand words in thirty days. The organisation announced its closure on 31 March 2025, and I told the story in A novel in a month, so I won't repeat it here. What remains is the good thing about that month: a deadline. A novella makes better use of it than a novel does, because it's a distance a calendar can hold.

If you start on Monday 9 November you've got twenty-two days until the 30th. As I suggest in that piece, I take off two spare days for work and the unexpected: that leaves twenty days of writing.

Here's the comparison: from today, fifty thousand words ask for 2,273 words a day, 2,500 with the spare days. A 29,000-word novella asks for 1,318, or 1,450 with the spare days.

I closed the first draft of Lettere dal cielo in fifteen days: 29,000 words works out at about 1,933 a day on average, a sum I've done just now, after the fact. They weren't fifteen smooth days. One day went on work, and the outline was already there, because the book started life as an idea for a short film. The method, mistakes included, is in A novel in a month. Only one thing matters here: if you've got a job, the novella is a distance you can actually plan.

The technical anatomy of a novella

One problem, one arc, a single subplot

One central problem, which the reader has to grasp within the first 3,000 words. One transformative arc. At most one subplot, tightly bound to the first, or two points of view looking at the same event.

Cast, time, space

A dominant protagonist and two to four supporting characters who embody opposing forces. No walk-ons with a proper name unless they've got a dramatic job to do. Time: days or weeks. Space: two or three places under pressure. Of Mice and Men has six chapters and few settings (the clearing by the river, the farmhands' bunkhouse, Crooks's room, the barn), and Steinbeck thought of it as a "play-novelette": a text to be read and to be performed.

The map of the beats against the word budget

Each beat has its own article in the series on structure: The first plot point, The inciting incident and the key event, The midpoint, The Climax, The resolution. Here I turn them into words, for a 30,000-word novella.

The percentages are trade conventions, not laws. On 29,000 words, as in my book, everything shifts by about 3%.

Three pacing models

• Symmetrical: 20 scenes of about 1,500 words. Solid rhythm, chapters of medium length.
• High density: 15 scenes of about 2,000 words. Longer blocks, fewer breaks.
• Fragmented: 50-60 micro-chapters of 400-600 words. It's the choice of Seta and Montedidio, which work through very short chapters and clean breaks.

The extended scene card

In A novel in a month I described the six-field card. For the novella I'm adding two.

The budget does one job only: it lets you spot early on a scene that's eating another one's space.

Scene and ellipsis

A novella lives between the scene shown, where reading time matches the time of the action, and the ellipsis, a clean line that skips whole days. If an event changes the direction of the story, you write it as a scene. If it only serves as a bridge, you cover it with an ellipsis. The enemy is the lazy summary: the author telling you what happened instead of letting you touch it. On rhythm and tension I've already written The importance of rhythm in writing and How to create tension in your story.

Three typical mistakes

• Points of view that multiply. The inner voices of four characters across 100-130 pages break the emotion. Stick with one.
• The false early climax. The big scene dropped halfway through, with the second half dragging itself through explanations and consequences.
• Abstract stakes. A purely intellectual dilemma can't survive brevity. You need physical consequences: if the protagonist fails, what do they lose by tomorrow morning?

The novellas that held up

Steinbeck: about 29,000 words

Of Mice and Men, 1937. In May 1936 Steinbeck's setter puppy, Toby, ate about half of the first draft, written by hand. Steinbeck wrote to a friend that perhaps the dog had been acting as a critic. Then he finished the manuscript over the following months, and the book came out in February 1937. The working title was Something That Happened. Sources give 29,000 or 29,160 words.

AI-generated image, inspired by the story of Toby the dog

Orwell: about 30,000 words

On 19 March 1944 Orwell wrote to his publisher that he'd finished a "little fairy story" of about 30,000 words, with a political meaning. Animal Farm came out on 17 August 1945 from Secker & Warburg, in 4,500 copies.

Hemingway: the isolated line of action

The Old Man and the Sea was written between December 1950 and February 1951 as an addendum to a larger sea project, a work in several books that Hemingway had in mind; the rest of that project came out posthumously, in 1970, as Islands in the Stream. On 1 September 1952 Life sold 5.3 million copies in two days with the story inside. In 1953 came the Pulitzer, in 1954 the Nobel.

Keegan: 116 pages, a single dilemma

Small Things Like These (Faber, 2021) is the shortest book, by page count, ever to reach the Booker shortlist, in 2022; Treacle Walker has fewer words. A coal merchant in New Ross, in County Wexford, has to decide whether to break the wall of silence around a mother and baby institution. One dilemma, one winter. The judges praised its clear, economical writing and its elegant structure, dense with moral themes.

Fitzgerald: London, on the Thames

Offshore (1979) won the Booker at 132 pages in the first edition: it's still the shortest book ever to have won it, and the prize's website notes that the win reopened a question, when does a novella become a novel. It's set in 1961 among the houseboats of Battersea Reach, the stretch of the Thames where the author had lived for years on a barge.

AI-generated image, inspired by the houseboats of Battersea Reach, where Offshore is set

Baricco and De Luca: Italy of the short chapters

Seta (Rizzoli, 1996) is a short novel of about a hundred pages, in very short chapters, sometimes a single sentence: the story of Hervé Joncour, a silkworm merchant in France in 1861. Montedidio (Feltrinelli, 2001) runs to 142 pages, is set in Naples, in the Montedidio district near Montecalvario, and follows a thirteen-year-old boy who works in the workshop of the carpenter mast'Errico. Short chapters, strong punctuation. It won the Prix Femina Étranger.

Lettere dal cielo: from the writer's side

At about 29,000 words, Lettere dal cielo is a novella by award standards. It started life as an idea for a short film, and I tell the story in A novel in a month. Steinbeck, Orwell and my book are the same size: between 29,000 and 30,000 words.

When length lets you down

Hemingway, two years earlier. Across the River and Into the Trees came out on 7 September 1950. It sold 75,000 copies in its first month and stayed 21 weeks on the New York Times list, but the critics largely panned it. Two years later, the short form redeemed him. I can't tell you why the 1950 novel didn't work: I'm documenting the fact, and the contrast with the novella that came straight after.

The prejudice about length. Animal Farm was turned down by Gollancz for political reasons, by Jonathan Cape after a conversation with an official at the Ministry of Information, by Nicholson & Watson and by Faber: T.S. Eliot's letter is dated 13 July 1944, and it admires the writing but not the point of view. Among the reasons for the rejections, according to an antiquarian bookseller's reconstruction, was also William Collins's: the book was too short. It still happens today. The editors Reedsy consulted say the big publishers are happy to take novellas from authors with an audience and much less so from debut writers: they cost as much as a long book to edit, design and promote, but sell at a lower price.

In Italy I'd already noticed it in Five hundred words to make a film in the reader's head: the obsession with the "doorstopper". Berto, in a bookshop, picks the book up and weighs it before reading the title. Bobby, in a bookshop on Piccadilly, reads the blurb and looks at the price. The result is the same: the novella starts at a disadvantage.

The limit of style. On Seta one reader writes "more form than substance". It's not a verdict: it's the risk that comes with the fragmented form. When the music of the sentences takes the place of the conflict, the novella turns into an elegant shop window with no blood in it.

The copywriter: Ogilvy and the man with the eyepatch

Anyone who writes advertising knows something the novelist learns late: you've got a fraction of a second to open a crack in the viewer's imagination.

In 1951 a small shirt-maker in Waterville, Maine, Hathaway, has a tight budget and wants a national campaign. David Ogilvy, English-born, with an agency founded in New York three years earlier, gets there after doing some research: photographs with an element of story appeal, a feature that suggests a story, draw more attention than average. It wasn't his invention: Ogilvy himself said he'd found the concept in a book by Harold Rudolph, a former research director at an agency.

Before getting to the set, according to an advertising archive's reconstruction, he tries eighteen ideas. Then, on the way, he stops at a chemist's and buys some black eyepatches. The model, the Russian baron George Wrangell, wears one over his eye. The first ad runs in the New Yorker on 22 September 1951, with a dry caption: the man in the Hathaway shirt. The visual idea, according to the most widely cited account, comes from a portrait of the former ambassador Lewis Douglas, who wore a patch after a fishing accident.

The lesson for the novella: a single detail out of place opens a question: who is he? What happened to him? You don't need ten eccentric characters. You need one asymmetrical element in the protagonist: a wound, a physical secret, a tic. And you need to stay faithful to the idea: the Hathaway character ran for years (sources say 15-25), and when another agency revamped it the eyepatch stayed.

The London case is Commander Edward Whitehead: born in Aldershot in 1908, a Royal Navy officer, a genuine Schweppes executive. Ogilvy talked him, still reluctant, into appearing in ads for the American market: "The man from Schweppes is here". The campaign ran for almost twenty years. A character built on a real person, with a detail that sticks in the mind: the beard.

Two caveats. The first: attention isn't enough, you have to sell. In the ad the eyepatch made you ask who the man was, and the caption answered with the name of the shirt: the odd detail was working for the product. In a novel it's the same. A scar that nobody explains and that never changes a single choice the protagonist makes is an eyepatch without a shirt: it's decoration, it doesn't serve the conflict.

The second: I haven't found a documented, verifiable negative case from a copywriter, and I'd rather say so than build one. The methodological flaw I can show comes from the Hathaway case itself. On the length of the campaign, sources range from 15 to 25 years, which is why I'm giving you the range and not a single number. The eighteen ideas tried before the shoot and the portrait of Ambassador Douglas come from reconstructions that repeat Ogilvy's anecdote, not from agency documents I've been able to see: that's why I write "according to the reconstruction". An anecdote repeated a hundred times settles into versions that don't match, and anyone who quotes it without checking inherits its errors. In a novella the same thing happens with a scene rewritten three times and never pruned: fragments of every version stay on the page. For the facts you recount, check the source; for the scenes, keep a single version.

I've already covered Ogilvy's ten writing rules in 10 rules for good writing from a famous advertising man.

Sample project card: from the tufa of Santa Maria Capua Vetere to City Road

I'll show you how the framework gets put on the ground, with an invented example.

Logline (the formula is the one from How to choose the first book to write: protagonist, goal, stakes): a restorer at the Campanian Amphitheatre has to decipher an inscription hidden on a block of tufa within six days, before the site closes, or the proof of an art-trafficking ring will be lost, along with the truth an archivist in London has been looking for over twenty years.

One clear problem, two gazes converging, a closed time frame.

Map and budget on 30,000 words, using the symmetrical model (20 scenes of 1,500):

The card for scene 05 (first turning point, 7,500 cumulative words):

Revision: from 35,000 to 30,000

Say the first draft closes at 35,000 words. To get to 30,000 you cut 5,000, about 14%: it's an example, not a rule.

In a quick first draft the fat usually hides in three places. At the start of scenes: characters coming in, saying hello, chatting about the traffic before getting to the clash; cut the first paragraphs and start the action midway. In explanations of emotions: the sentence saying the protagonist was frightened, straight after a gesture that had already shown it. In spurious subplots: you can keep only one, and if the protagonist's romantic crisis has no bearing on the resolution, it goes.

I described the three passes (structure, rhythm, line) in A novel in a month; on method I wrote The second look and Self-editing: how to correct yourself in copywriting. For the novella I add four checks: the subplot count, the count of characters with lines, the removable-scene test, and the comparison with the map. Does the first turning point really fall at 25%? Does the midpoint really change direction?

There's also the opposite test. If every scene is a summary, the draft isn't lean: it's squashed, and it needs reopening.

After 30 November: where a novella goes

On 30 November the file is closed and the part that doesn't depend on you begins.

The big publishers. As I said, they take novellas from authors with an audience rather than from debut writers. The Italian examples point the same way: Seta came out from Rizzoli in 1996, when Baricco already had his 1991 debut behind him; Montedidio came out from Feltrinelli in 2001, after years of books by De Luca, who made his debut in 1989.

Independents and translations. In London the example is Peirene Press, founded in 2008 to bring translated European novellas into English and now open to writing from all over the world. Its titles have been longlisted seven times for the International Booker, and since 2021 the press has been run by Stella Sabin and James Tookey. It publishes translations, so it isn't an address for anyone sending in a text written in English: it's proof that the British market has a place for the form.

Competitions. The Mslexia Women's Novella Competition appears to be on pause according to Duotrope: check the website before planning a submission.

Self-publishing. In an ebook the reader can't see the thickness of the spine, and the distinction between novella and novel matters less. Platform, ISBN, layout and legal deposit in Italy and the UK I've covered in A novel in a month, mistakes included: I won't repeat them. And if anyone asks you to pay to be published, read The manuscript in the drawer and who asks you to pay first.

The book ends before the landing

Back to the window. The novella isn't the easy form: it's the form that forces you to decide. One problem, one arc, one ending. If you've got a job and twenty-two days, it's the November distance you can plan with a table and a calendar rather than with faith. You'll find the sprint in Five hundred words to make a film in the reader's head. The method for the writing days is in A novel in a month. Here you've got the middle distance.