write4details said:
There are not "cutoff" lengths to call something a certain type of fiction. Part of "what it is" is what you see it as, not a number.
If you look through submission pages, you see that a lot of magazines accept fiction up to 10,0000 words.
The cutoff between "short fiction" and "flash fiction" or "short shorts" is also arbitary...and depends upon what the mag or contest accepts.
Don't have any pre-conceived notion about length...if it wants to be longer, let er rip. Who knows what you have going here?
Of course some magazines giggle the numbers a little, but the numbers I gave are not arbitray. They've been the standard for nearly a hundred years, and are used by nearly every magazine editor out there.
You'd darned well better have a pre-conceived notion about length, unless selling what you write isn't of any importance. "Let er" rip" is usually what writers do who either don't know anything about story structure, or don't really care whether or not what they write sells.
First, magazines are put together like jigsaw puzzles, and every piece has to fit. It's not as easy as just adding pages for longer stories. This would put a magazine out of business overnight. Nor is it as easy as just cuting something else to make room for somethign longer.
Even more important, the difference between a short story and a novelette/novella/novel is not primarily one of length, but of structure and story elements. A 100,000 word short story is still not a novel, and would bore the bejeebers out of anyone who tried to read it.
In order to write publishable fiction at these various lengths, you first have to know what is required of each length. Robert E. Forward did NOT write 20,000 word short stories. If he had, he would have gone unpublished, and no one today would have heard of him. What he did write was short novels, and these are very differenrt things than long short stories. The structure is different, the story is different, the plot elements are different, the pacing is different, and the connecting threads running through the novella do not weave the same pattern as threads in a short story weave.
Read issues of Analog and Asimov's. They contain short stories, novelettes, and novellas, and they, like nearly every other magazine out there, use the specific lentgths I quoted. And when you read these three types of fiction, you should be able to clearly see that length is only a small part of the difference between the three. If you can't, you're in trouble.
And magazines want what they want, not what writers want to give them. You pay far too much attention to submissions guidelines. Just because submission guidelines state that a magazine uses fiction of up to 10,000 words in no way, shape, or form means they want a short story of this length, or that you can sell them something this long, or even that they've ever bought something this long.
Submission guidelines should be read, but they are only guidelines, and they seldom mean what new writers try to make them mean. This is why you must read issues of the magazine itself to really understand the guidelines. There is no substitute for reading the magazine.
Now, when a magazine say it takes fiction up to 10,000 words, what it means most of the time is that three years ago, it bought a 10,000 word story, and may again in three more years, if that 10,000 word story comes from a writer with a name big enough to look good on the cover, and to make readers buy the magazine.
It also means that the 10,000 word story needs to come from a writer who knows the difference between a short story and a novelette, which isn't just length.
The first rule of reading guidelines is to ignore the upper and lower limits for fiction. Odds are a thousand to one against selling the magazine anything at either of these lengths. Especially the upper limit. These lengths are nearly always reserved for special circumstances and special writers.
To stand any real chance of selling to a paying magazine, the writer must know the
preferred length, and submit a story very close to this length. Guidelines will sometimes state preferred length, but most often do not because the editor rightfully expects the writer to read several issues of the magazine before submitting fiction. When you do this, you can see the preferred length for yourself.
And you can see what the editor means by "literary," "mystery," "mainstream." etc. His idea of what a literary or mainstream or mystery or SF story is will likely be very different than your own. The only way to know what he or she means is to read several issues of the magazine.
If you really want to be a selling short story writer, at least to paying magazines, you must read the magazine, you must write to
preferred length, and you must understand there is a difference between short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels, and the difference is far, far more than just length.
"Let 'er rip," and thinking that a short story, a novelette, and a novella are the sames things at different lengths is just a good way to increase your collection of rejection slips.
That way, you'll have more room to develop your plot, etc. without having to write a novel. Hope that helps.