What is a Book?

 A book is a group of pages that are bound together as one piece. Books can have pictures, no pictures, stories, memoirs and whatever. Years ago, books had to be of a certain length. Books under about 50 pages, or a quarter-inch to three-eighths-inch thick including content and covers, were treated by binderies as juvenile books, and published to meet certain physical standards. There were also library, text book, and mass-market standards. Today however, with digital files, digital images, and print-on-demand books, not only are small books much more practical, but for most of us, we don’t have to worry about standards.

One question you however, as a matter of necessity, need to resolve is whether or not your story can become a novel: because not all stories can. The conflict and characters must be of enough substance that you have the stuff to write several hundred pages.

A short story ranges from the 500 word micro story to 7,500 to 10,000 words. One might think of the average short story as being around 2,000 to 2,500 words. It usually has one incident, a single plot, and few characters. Whereas, a novella runs 20,000 to 40,000 words.

A novel is usually 40,000 words and up. Typically it has many characters, subplots, locations, and it may cover a broader period of time. It is the most expansive narrative form. Less is expected from each word than from words in the shorter forms. That is not to say that you can get away with the almost-right word, but simply that less is needed from each word to convey your ideas.

Proportional to length is the concreteness of the propelling idea of the work. A poem must be far more abstract than a novel. We expect longer works to be specific.

Let us consider the following short account as plot for a book

Captain Cook was brutally murdered. He was a wonderful person and a gifted artist. Jane, his wife, also a talented artist, became the suspect, as spouses usually do. They had been planning a birthday lunch for her grandmother, and Jane spent the morning with her before going home to pick him up and then going for lunch. Jane returned home to find Captain Cook dead on the kitchen floor with a dagger in his back, and his face bashed in with two large rocks. The police bungled the investigation. No charges were brought against her. Her lawyer advised her to sell her house and move. She did, and no one here has seen her or heard from her since.

If we want to write about Jane’s feelings of loss, we might write a short poem.

If we want to tell the outline of the story and show the horror of returning home to find her life turned upside down, we might write a short story.

If we want to explore the story, watch how the murder split families and rippled through the community; if we want to have a trial and study how the jurors dealt with it, we would write a novel.

A non-fiction book would examine the crime and the evidence. It would follow the police investigators, and it would show a tragically failed investigation, with no justice, regardless of who might have committed the crime.

If we were making a movie of it, we might show the murder and exaggerate Jane’s plight, with the police watching her every move. Either before a trial or during it, her lawyer’s investigator would find the evidence—evidence willfully overlooked by the police—that would exonerate her.

If we were making a stage play, we might concentrate on a trial or a family, showing how a single murder could ripple outwards shredding people’s lives far removed from the actual murder.

There are, of course many other possibilities for each format, but I want to show quickly how the story’s complexity or simplification is served by each format. Movies, plays, and short stories cannot show as much as a novel. Each form controls the nature of the content.

Contrary to the common myth that anything can happen in fiction I hereby submit that if the story is told well, only one thing can happen. Nothing else will work, whereas, anything can happen in real life, which often cannot be written because it would not be believed.