Writing Short without Shortchanging Readers

Thoughts on Writing Climate Fiction Novellas by Lauren C. Teffeau

With the disruption of attention spans and supply chains the last few years, novellas—short novels roughly 20,000 to 40,000 words long—have been flourishing. As publishers tighten their belts and technology makes print-on-demand accessible to more and more authors and publishers, novellas have become increasingly popular both economically and in terms of courting readers allergic to literary commitment when they can just swipe right and find their next read or the latest vid on TikTok.

My desertpunk environmental fantasy novella A Hunger with No Name was published by the University of Tampa Press in 2024. And this past March, my sapphic eco-thriller Accelerated Growth Environment came out from Shiraki Press. Both the University of Tampa’s Pomme imprint and Shiraki Press specialize in the novella format. And there are others out there as well actively seeking stories. Perhaps your stories.

So what follows are ways to make this shorter format work for you without shortchanging the reader experience.

Lean into the Advantages of the Novella Format

With novellas, you have the opportunity to write something that couldn’t work any other way. Whether you are writing a tightly focused story, a highly experimental one, or something in-between, the novella format can work for you.

Novels can have any number of subplots and characters to support story action, but novellas must be much more selective in terms of plot elements and number of characters. A good rule of thumb, according to author Mary Robinette Kowal, is we can expect to add 500 to 1000 words for every character or location we introduce to our story—so you can see just how quickly our story choices add up to words on the page.

Another way of looking at novellas comes from writing screenplays. For writers writing their first feature script, which is usually expected to be a tight 90 minutes (ie pages) long, you must devote the bulk of the film to the “A” plot. You don’t have time for subplots or a cast of thousands. That economy in story scope lends itself very well to writing novellas.

But what if your story deviates from the traditional three-act structure? Well, there is also more flexibility for literary experimentation in form, voice, and treatment in novellas that would otherwise be fatiguing to read over the course of a whole novel. Examples of voice-y, experimental work: Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Keye’s Flowers for Algernon, El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s This is How You Lose the Time War. All of these stories employ specific stylistic and narrative choices, that, while effective in a shorter format, would become repetitive or annoying the longer they went on. Like a one-trick pony—great the first time, but tiresome after a while. But novellas are the perfect length to take risks with structure and form, allowing you to focus on a singular issue that would otherwise be drowned out or diluted by the requirements of the novel.

Working from the Top-Down

Whether it is a short story that got out of control or a novel idea that never really took off, oftentimes novellas happen by accident. That’s what happened to me and A Hunger with No Name. I first wrote a long short story and felt pained at cutting it down any further. I soon ran out of story markets that accepted novelettes and decided to expand it into a novel. And it worked… for a little while. I stalled out around 65k and couldn’t decide where to go with it. I realized I was adding story elements just to pad out my word count, which wasn’t helping me or my story. When I decided on the novella format, suddenly things fell into place. Instead of trying to bulk things up, I could pare down to the essentials and make them shine.

To help me revise, I asked myself the following questions:

◦ What is the actual story I’m trying to tell here? (You’d be surprised at how hard this is to answer sometimes!)

◦ Am I adding this for some arbitrary reason or does this serve the story I’m telling?

◦ How do I make this story format feel inevitable?

That last one was especially important as I didn’t want the reader to feel my behind-the-scenes struggle in writing the book. To ensure that, I leaned into my character’s voice and organized the narrative in a unique way that reinforced the story’s themes, connecting everything together. And that hard work seems to have paid off since the novella came in third place out of 100 novellas published by indie authors and small presses in the third annual Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship.

Starting from the Bottom-Up

Writing Accelerated Growth Environment was a different experience. In that case, I knew the story I wanted to write was novella-shaped from the beginning, which really does help. As I was building my characters and my story world, I knew every element I introduced needed to serve double, sometimes triple duty. Being strict about what world details I included that could also be plot clues and/or indicative of character helped tremendously with story planning.

Questions I asked myself as I drafted:

◦ How can I streamline my plot without sacrificing tension?

◦ How can I imply things about my characters without getting mired in backstory?

◦ Is this something I can integrate into my story/world or is this a distraction from what I’m trying to do?

And above all else, remember the goal of writing a tightly focused story where every element needs to contribute something to the narrative. If you can take it out and not lose anything, does it need to be there in the first place?

Word Count Problem-Solving

Whether you are way over or way under your target word count, here are some hard-won suggestions on how to revise.

TOO FEW WORDS:

◦ Description – Make sure you are utilizing your description to full effect but don’t just add words. Remember to utilize active voice and microtension to keep readers engaged.

◦ Depth of characterization – You can always go deeper with your characters, and most readers won’t mind the dimension it adds to your story so long as you make it relevant.

◦ Pacing – Make sure you aren’t skipping over opportunities to deepen conflict, suspense, or character. Take a look at movie and video game adaptations to see how they handle pacing, especially transitions. Comedy monologues are another place to see how one simple thing can be blown up into an hour-long special.

◦ Tropes – See if you can identify any complimentary tropes you can layer in to enrich your story. This will give you ways to bolster your plot and differentiate it from others.

TOO MANY WORDS:

◦ Description – Pare it back to just the evocative essentials.

◦ Characters – Instead of going deeper with characterization, look to include more indirect indicators. Also analyze your cast to see if there are any characters you can combine or eliminate outright.

◦ Pacing – Examine your transitions and subplots to ensure they aren’t taking over your story. Keep your scenes tight and focused with lots of forward momentum.

◦ Tropes – See if you can use complimentary tropes as genre shorthand or pick one to stand in for other related ones.

◦ Grammar – Brutally assess your sentences for concision. Two or more adjectives? Pick the stronger one and cut the rest. Stage directions are another place to be merciless. Instead of descriptive chunks, layer it into dialogue tags.

Incorporating Environmental Themes

I know I don’t need to tell you how important environmental themes are these days, regardless of whether you are writing realistically or fantastically. Considering how long it takes to write something, revise it, and get it published, no matter what path you take, the world you wrote it in will be quite different from the one it is released into, given the rapid pace of change we are living through. When you are writing science fiction in particular, like I do, deciding how you are going to deal with the climate crisis is a fundamental part of your worldbuilding.

With novellas, you won’t have the time or space to fully explicate your story world as you would in a novel, so you will need to be judicious in what you do focus on. Writers are constantly advised to focus on the telling detail that can stand in for the whole. You can do that with your environmental elements as well, where going more granular, more specific, not only saves story space but also sets your story apart. Consider an aspect of the climate crisis that mirrors your story’s theme or conflict your characters face and focus on that instead of something that isn’t as resonant.

Another consideration with novellas is the shorter format does allow you to explore aspects of the climate crisis that are unpleasant or difficult to face. Take note of the novella-length eco-horror being published by places like Stelliform Press and Apex’s Violet Lichen imprint. These despairing or dystopic stories would be an unbearable grind to read over the course of a novel, but when they are shorter, they can be extremely effective for readers looking to engage with that kind of story. But pay attention to studies that show how the negative news cycle and climate literature can feed into a growing sense of doomerism that impedes people’s ability to hope for change and the brighter future we all want.

The Novella Tax

You’ve written an amazing novella. Congratulations! But one caveat to all this is some people will be unhappy with the novella format, no matter what you do. It seems to be a perennial complaint that books of this length are “too short,” or “missing something,” or “feel underdeveloped.” This is because, whether readers or reviewers are cognizant of it or not, the novel format is something everyone understands, whereas novellas are less studied and consumed. My husband calls this the “novella tax,” and it can and will show up in your reviews and rankings, no matter how good of a story you’ve crafted. Ask me how I know.

When I was lamenting an early review that came in for Accelerated Growth Environment with that complaint, my editor Brianne at Shiraki Press came back with a great way to re-contextualize that kind of feedback: “I’m going to take every single one of those complaints as a sign that they really liked the book and wished there was another one.”

And I’m going to try to convince my writer brain the same thing.

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If nothing else, I want you to remember it takes time to learn how you write. It takes time to learn what you can do in 1k, 5K, 30K, 100K. It takes time to come up with a structure that sings. It takes time to set something aside and come back to it with fresh eyes. And not just fresh eyes—the emotional distance to truly see your story for what it is...and what it could be.

And who knows? Perhaps the novella is the perfect container for your next story or that broken one sitting on your hard drive somewhere. Don’t be afraid to tackle this misunderstood format, and I hope what I’ve shared here will help you on your writing journey!

Find out more about Accelerated Growth Environment and A Hunger with No Name.

Lauren C. Teffeau’s work examines environmental issues and the role of technology in our lives through fantastical adventures and immersive worlds. Her books include the eco-thriller Accelerated Growth Environment (Shiraki Press, 2026), the desertpunk environmental fantasy A Hunger with No Name (University of Tampa Press, 2024), which came in third place in the third annual Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship, and the cyberpunk/solarpunk adventure Implanted (Angry Robot, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 Compton Crook Award for best first SF/F/H novel and named a definitive work of climate fiction by Grist. Over twenty of her short stories have appeared in venues like Sunday Morning Transport, DreamForge Magazine, After Dinner Conversation, and the Stoker Award-nominated Chromophobia: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women in Horror. To learn more, please visit https://laurencteffeau.com

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GIVEAWAY

The Climate Fiction Prize are offering 3 copies of the winning book Hum by Helen Phillips, who we interviewed in last week’s newsletter. UK subscribers can enter by leaving a comment on this post. Competition ends 17th July.

Hum is a near-future novel in which May loses her job to artificial intelligence and, desperate to resolve her family’s debt, becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognised by surveillance. May splurges a significant portion of these hard won funds to gain access to one of the last remaining green spaces.

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Online Course: Writing Compelling Climate Fiction with Amanda Niehaus

Wednesday 23 to Tuesday 29 September 2026 (1-week), online

Temperatures are rising and catastrophic droughts, storms and bushfires are becoming more frequent and intense. It could be argued that today, all fiction is and should be climate fiction. Join trained biologist and award-winning writer Amanda Niehaus, to delve into the world of climate fiction. Fiction creates empathy by embedding readers in others’ lives and experiences.

Can our writing build empathy for nature and climate, too? The short answer is – yes! And though the stats are dire, our writing doesn’t have to be. In this course, we’ll learn ways to inspire curiosity, introspection and awe in readers to incite connection and change. This course is for everyone!

In this workshop, participants will:

1. Learn how to use familiar storylines (e.g. folk or fairy tales, family histories) as the basis for new climate fiction.

2. Learn how fiction builds empathy and helps us understand difficult or distant concepts like climate change.

3. Learn how to use storytelling and plot techniques to inspire curiosity in readers.

4. Learn how to use detail and “slow writing” to inspire awe in readers.

Find out more at Writing NSW