[ Thursday, May 26, 2005   Mini-novels? by redchurch ]

So I'm cruising right along through Leading the Revolution, and I decide to take a quick fiction break. Why? Because I've had Philip K. Dick's Cosmic Puppets sitting in the pile for about 2 months now. Now, even though I'm a filthy horrible Dabbler and prone to incessant distraction, I usually don't just switch gears so quickly without good reason. What is this good reason Eric speaks of? The novel is only 143 pages. The result? I read the entire thing in a few hours. The novel actually wasn't that great in my humble opinion, but there was something else that struck me; Why don't fiction authors publish 150 page novels? It's a magical number I tell you. The longest short-stories I've read were somewhere between 50-75 pages. While I love short stories, often because of the page constraints they end up following a certain format, such as the parable or 30-min Twilight Zone sketch-with-a-catch. But 150 pages is just right. Plenty of pages to write a full-blown story that's lean and mean, without all that sluggish fat of typical novels, and the reader can breeze through it in less than a day. It also lifts a huge burden off the writer having to fill 300-400 pages as per the typical novel.

So what's up with that? Why don't writers use a shorter novel format?