Today I want to have a chat about novels and novellas.
I have talked about these two before, but today I want to talk about them a little differently, from a far more personal standpoint. One of my current WIP (work in progress) is The Man in Winter, it tells the story of Arthur, who lost his wife Molly when a break-in went wrong. After the man responsible is found and jailed everyone rebuilds their lives. But after moving into a retirement community, Art sees Molly again, and she’s got a lot to tell him about what happened that night and why justice still needs to be done. But who’s going to believe an elderly man with a diagnosis of dementia?
Originally, when this idea came to me, it came to me as a novella. I wrote the first draft over a few months and let it flow naturally, with only a loose plan of what I wanted to do. This style of writing is unlike me. I plan my stories to death before putting the first word to paper, but Art and his story walked into my head in perfect technicolour, requiring very little planning on my part. Then, as Art’s story wound to a close, the key thing I noticed about it was that it was short. Between 30k–40k words.
Continue reading “Katie’s Stories: You Can’t Turn A Circle Into A Square”
Letters from a Horror Writer 