It just occurred to me this week that it’s weird that in terms of classifications of narrative works of fiction, we only have short stories (or novelletes), novellas, and novels.
Specifically my issue is that the classification of “novel” is **40,000 or more words**, at least according to the first result when I Googled it. So when choosing or comparing works of fiction, a tiny squeak of a book like *The Great Gatsby* (50,061 words) or *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy* (46,333 words) is categorized as the same type of work as *Les Miserables* (545,925 words) or *The Lord of the Rings* (579,459 words).
If we had a new word to describe a narrative works of fiction that exceeds a certain length, I think it would help in choosing books to read and for the sake of comparing different stories. It doesn’t make sense to classify two stories as the same type of thing if one takes ten timed as long to read as the other. And with big **thick** fantasy novels and the like rising in popularity, it makes sense to add another division line.
This occurred to me because I’ve started a project recently of, for my own personal satisfaction, reading and ranking all the works of Stephen King. I had it separated into the three categories, and then came upon the fact that *The Stand* and *It* each approaches 500k words, whereas his average novel length is merely 150k, with some being well below 100k.
My proposal is that we officially cap “novels” at 300k words. There’s still an enormous range of lengths there, but it avoids the reclassifying of too many things. And from here on out (or until someone comes up with a better word), I propose that a work of fiction exceeding 300k words be classified as **NOVELUNK** (as in “big lunk of a novel”).
by BagOfSmallerBags
20 Comments
I had the understanding that LOTR, since it comprises Fellowship, Two Towers, and Return of the King, is an “omnibus” if you refer to it as one unit. But that already has a definition and can’t apply to something like Les Mis. For any really huge novel I’ve just called them doorstoppers lol.
Why? You can tell how long a book is from its size. What is added by having a particular word for “long books”? Anyway, people already use the slang “doorstopper” for this.
They’re called Epics.
“Doorstopper” is commonly used for super long fantasy novels. I like to also can them “the kind of book you really don’t want to drop on your foot”
A Saga?
This feels like a solution in search of a problem. What would we be solving by coming up with words for books that are 100k words, 250k, 500k, and so on?
“Big book”
“Editor fodder”
Tome- Synonymous with book; especially large and scholarly.
I agree with you on this. A 250 page novel isn’t the same as something hitting 1200 pages.
A 90 minute movie isn’t the same as a 6 hour miniseries. We have different names for them. Sure movies and books are different media, but still I think the point stands.
In reference to your Stephen King quest, how’d you like Under the Dome? In some ways it’s classic King complete with wacky ending, but it could’ve been half as long and lost very little.
Meganovelasaur?
Proust’s *In Search of Lost Time* is 1,267,069 words.
Who even cares? What problem are you trying to solve exactly?
“Chinese webnovel”.
Donezo.
Meganovel and giganovel.
With the rise of webnovels it’s probably not a bad idea to have a delineation.
A webnovel like Worm for instance is longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
There are plenty of works of fiction that are written episodically now so are going to have insane word counts.
Let’s do this properly and use SI-prefixes
Hektonovel: 100 to 999 words
Kilonovel: 1000 to 999.999 words
Meganovel: 1.000.000 to 999.999.999 words
and so on: Giganovel, Teranovel, Petanovel, Exanovel, Zettanovel, Yottanovel, Ronnanovel, Quettanovel (around 10^30 words, give or take a few)
Lol. OP read the r/books comment explaining the difference between a novela and a novel and decided to create a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.
It seems to me that if we accept the length of a book by the number of words it contains, we need only have a gauge based on a list of well known books sorted by word length. Then everyone can estimate the volume of a proffered book by comparison.
Is a hotdog a sandwich?