you: 25,000 to 35,000 words are numbers apt to make even the most stout-hearted writer
of fiction shake and shiver in his boots. There is no hard-and-fast definition of what either
a novel or a short story is – at least not in terms of word-count – nor should there be. But
when a writer approaches the 20,000-word mark, he knows he is edging out of the
country of the short story. Likewise, when he passes the 40,000-word mark, he is edging
into the country of the novel. The borders of the country between these two more orderly
regions are ill-defined, but at some point the writer wakes up with alarm and realizes that
he’s come or is coming to a really terrible place, an anarchy-ridden literary banana
republic called the ‘novella’ (or, rather too cutesy for my taste, the ‘novelette’).
Now, artistically speaking, there’s nothing at all wrong with the novella. Of course,
there’s nothing wrong with circus
* Something else about them, which I just realized: each one was written in a different
house – three of those in Maine and one in Boulder, Colorado.
freaks, either, except that you rarely see them outside of the circus. The point is that
there are great novellas, but they traditionally only sell to the ‘genre markets’ (that’s the
polite term; the impolite but more accurate one is ‘ghetto markets’). You can sell a good
mystery novella to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine or Mike Shayne’s Mystery
Magazine, a good science fiction novella to Amazing or Analog, maybe even to Omni or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ironically, there are also markets for good horror novellas: the aforementioned F&SF is one; The Twilight Zone is another and there are various anthologies of original creepy fiction, such as the Shadows series published by Doubleday and edited by Charles L. Grant.
But for novellas which can, on measure, only be described with the word ‘mainstream’
(a word almost as depressing as ‘genre’)… boy, as far as marketability goes, you in a heap
o’ trouble. You look at your 25,000-to-35,000-word manuscript dismally, twist the cap off
a beer, and in your head you seem to hear a heavily accented and rather greasy voice
saying: ‘BueSos dias, senorl How was your flight on Revolution Airways? You like to
eeet pretty-good fine I theenk, si? Welcome to Novella, senorl You going to like heet
here preety-good-fine, I theenk! Have a cheap cigar! Have some feelthy peectures! Put
your feet up, senior, I theenk your story is going to be here a long, long time … quepasal Ah-ha-hah-hah-hah!’ Depressing.
Once upon a time (he mourned) there really was a market for such tales – there were
magical magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and The American
Mercury. Fiction – fiction both short and long – was a staple of these and others. And, if the story was too long for a single issue, it was serialized in three parts, or five, or nine.
The poisonous idea of ‘condensing’ or ‘excerpting’ novels was as yet unknown (both
Playboy and Cosmopolitan have honed this particular obscenity to a noxious science: you can now read an entire novel in twenty minutes!), the tale was given the space it
demanded, and I doubt if I’m the only one who can remember waiting for the mailman all
day long because the new Post was due and a new short story by Ray Bradbury had been
promised, or perhaps because the final episode of the latest Clarence Buddington Kelland
serial was due.
(My anxiety made me a particularly easy mark. When the postman finally did show up,
walking briskly with his leather bag over his shoulder, dressed in his summer-issue shorts
and wearing his summer-issue sun helmet, I’d meet him at the end of the walk, dancing
from one foot to the other as if I badly needed to go to the bathroom; my heart in my
throat. Grinning rather cruelly, he’d hand me an electric bill. Nothing but that. Heart
plummets into my shoes. Finally he relents and gives me the Post after all: grinning
Eisenhower on the cover, painted by Norman Rockwell; an article on Sophia Loren by
Pete Martin; ‘I Say He’s a Wonderful Guy’, by Pat Nixon, concerning – yeah, you guessed it – her husband Richard; and, of course, stories. Long ones, short ones, and the last
chapter of the Kelland serial. Praise God!)
And this didn’t happen just once in a while; this happened every fucking week! The day
that the Post came, I guess I was the happiest kid on the whole eastern seaboard.
There are still magazines that publish long fiction – Atlantic Monthly and The New
Yorker are two which have been particularly sympathetic to the publication problems of a writer who has delivered (we won’t say ‘gotten’; that’s too close to ‘misbegotten’) a 30,000-word novella. But neither of these magazines has been particularly receptive to my stuff,
which is fairly plain, not very literary, and sometimes (although it hurts like hell to admit
it) downright clumsy.
To some degree or other, I would guess that those very qualities – unadmirable though
they may be – have been responsible for the success of my novels. Most of them have
been plain fiction for plain folks, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries
from McDonald’s. I am able to recognize elegant prose and to respond to it, but have
found it difficult or impossible to write it myself (most of my idols as a maturing writer
were muscular novelists with prose styles which ranged from the horrible to the
nonexistent: cats like Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris). Subtract elegance from the
novelist’s craft and one finds himself left with only one strong leg to stand on, and that leg
is good weight. As a result, I’ve tried as hard as I can, always, to give good weight. Put
another way, if you find out you can’t run like a thoroughbred, you can still pull your
brains out (A voice rises from the balcony: ‘What brains, King?’ Ha-ha, very funny, fella, you can leave now).
The result of all this is that, when it came to the novellas you’ve just read, I found
myself in a puzzling position. I had gotten to a place with my novels where people were
saying King could publish his laundry list if he wanted to (and there are critics who claim
that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the last eight years or so), but I couldn’t publish
these tales because they were too long to be short and too short to be really long. If you
see what I mean.
‘Si, senor, I see! Take off your shoes! Have some cheap rum! Soon thee Medicore
Revolucion Steel Band iss gonna come along and play some bad calypso! You like eet
preety-good-fine, I theenk! And you got time, senor! You got time because I theenk your
story ees gonna -‘
– be here a long time, yeah, yeah, great, why don’t you go somewhere and overthrow a
puppet imperialist democracy?
So I finally decided to see if Viking, my hardcover publisher, and New American
Library, my paperback publisher, would want to do-a book with stories in it about an off-
beat prison-break, an old man and a young boy locked up in a gruesome relationship
based on mutual parasitism, a quartet of country boys on a journey of discovery, and an
off-the-wall horror story about a young woman determined to give birth to her child no
matter what (or maybe the story is actually about that odd Club that isn’t a Club). The
publishers said okay. And that is how I managed to break these four long stories out of
the banana republic of the novella.
I hope you liked them preety-good-fine, muchachos and muchachas.
Oh, one thing about type-casting before I call it a day.
Was talking to my editor – not Bill Thompson, this is my new editor, real nice guy
named Alan Williams, smart, witty, able, but usually on jury duty somewhere deep in the
bowels of New Jersey – about a year ago.
‘Loved Ciyo,’ Alan says (the editorial work on that novel, a real shaggy-dog story, had
just been completed). ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do next?’
Deja’ vu sets in. I have had this conversation before.
‘Well, yeah,’ I say. ‘I have given it some thought -‘
‘Lay it on me.’
‘What would you think about a book of four novellas? Most or all of them just sort of
ordinary stories? What would you think about that?’
‘Novellas,’ Alan says. He is being a good sport, but his voice says some of the joy may
have just gone out of his day; his voice says he feels he has just won two tickets to some
dubious little banana republic on Revolucion Airways. ‘Long stories, you mean.’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I say. ‘And we’ll call the book something like “Different Seasons”, just so people will get the idea that it’s not about vampires or haunted hotels or anything