Writing the Novella, Sharon Oard Warner
A couple of weeks back, a reader of this not-so-august column dm’d me with these kind words — “I like the way you don't just review plot or craft but suggest ways to read.” Suggesting ways to read a book is one thing I try to do, and I want to do it right now and right here. So lissin up, novella (and, really any other type of fiction) writers — read Sharon Oard Warner’s Writing the Novella with highlighter in hand. This is craft writing at its best.
Warner’s style is casual and humorous, her voice generous and, at points, vulnerable as she recounts her own particular struggles to perfect her craft. And she is a champion of this somewhat ambiguous beast, the novella, positioned as it is between the brevity of the short story and the expansive breadth of the novel. Though Writing the Novella is aimed at, well, novella writers, Warner’s writing and journaling assignments (she is a former professor — see note) will deepen any fiction writer’s grasp of her characters and point the way as she teases out the whats, and more importantly, the whys of her tale. Warner grounds her advice, always on point, by drawing on three “touchstone” classics — Ethan Frome, The House on Mango Street, and Fahrenheit 451 — even as she mines the novella oeuvre more broadly.
Warner’s scholarship with respect to this subject matter is gobsmacking — she must have read every craft book ever written, and her Recommended Reading list would keep any industrious reader beavering away for a year. Writing the Novella would serve well as the primary text for a graduate course focusing on this particular form but any writer, at any stage of her career, will find plenty here to enrich her work. The novella, Warner suggests, may be coming into its own in this, our current, attention-deprived milieu, so perhaps this is the moment to wipe down your computer screen, make yourself a cup of coffee, and start banging those keys. If you are inspired to tackle this shorter form, make sure that Warner’s Writing the Novella sits close at hand. Trust me, you’re like to get lost, and this marvelous piece of craft writing will point your way home.
Buy Writing the Novella at your neighborhood bookseller or at bookshop.org, an online retailer that uses part of its proceeds to benefit local bookstores. Books are an intimate thing, best acquired face to face from someone who loves them as much as you do. Let’s keep those local shrines to the word on a page alive and kicking.
Note: I said I was done with the practice of reviewing work by people I know, yet here I am, back at it. Sharon Warner was one of my first writing professors at the University of New Mexico, where I participated in writing workshops while plodding soullessly on a Ph.D. in an unrelated field. I’ve always esteemed her, which is why I agreed to engage this particular volume, my previous resolutions to the contrary. Fortunately, Writing the Novella is terrific. Otherwise, I’d not have reviewed it.
