Matt's comments (member since Jan 06, 2009)

Matt's comments from the Great Novellas group.

Novellete is shorter.

So far as I know, word count is the defining feature. At least, that is the criteria that the Hugo awards use to separate short stories, novelletes, novellas, and full novels.

I've always seen the separation as an excuse to offer more awards. From the 19th century onward, the novel and the short story are fully developed styles of fiction. I'm not sure what literary criteria we'd use to separate the novella from a novel or novellette from a short story other than length, but having never read alot of either I can't definitively say that there isn't one.

For example, a short story is generally considered to be contained within a single 'chapter' which is a simple self-contained story arc. Perhaps a novellette is a a story that can be broken into several acts, each of which is itself a short story, but no more than a certain small number or these - three or five seems a likely choice for western literature.

One of the problems would then be defining these acts in a rigorous way. For example, Anathem has 937 pages, but the author has broken it into something like 7 acts. It would be lovely if we could demonstrate that each act was itself a novellette, but I suspect that modern literature lacks any such rigorous discipline.