It's length, but the length then has an impact on the way the story is constructed.
People have created specific length categories for different purposes, in word count because that's the easiest thing to measure. So for example, in science fiction and fantasy, a novella is considered to be anything from 17,500 words to 40,000 words, and a short story is anything up to 7,500 words (and in between is a novelette). Other genres use different categories -- e.g. romance seems to usually regard anything from 30,000 up to be a novel, rather than from 40,000 up.
But stories that work well at different lengths do have a different feel to them. An idea that is a good tight story at short story length may feel padded and slow-moving at novella length, with not enough plot to sustain the length. Whereas if you take a novella and try to cut it down to short story length, it may feel like the synopsis for a story rather than the story itself.
You might also use different techniques -- for an example, look at the different feel, and the different writing style, between the short story of Lord and Master and the novel I later wrote from the same idea. The short story is actually a chapter in the novel, but when I wrote the short I did it in first person present tense. When I wrote the novel, I did so in third person past tense, which tends work better for longer stories than first person present tense does. I rewrote the short into third person past tense, and that changes the way it reads.
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Date: 2008-01-22 03:49 pm (UTC)People have created specific length categories for different purposes, in word count because that's the easiest thing to measure. So for example, in science fiction and fantasy, a novella is considered to be anything from 17,500 words to 40,000 words, and a short story is anything up to 7,500 words (and in between is a novelette). Other genres use different categories -- e.g. romance seems to usually regard anything from 30,000 up to be a novel, rather than from 40,000 up.
But stories that work well at different lengths do have a different feel to them. An idea that is a good tight story at short story length may feel padded and slow-moving at novella length, with not enough plot to sustain the length. Whereas if you take a novella and try to cut it down to short story length, it may feel like the synopsis for a story rather than the story itself.
You might also use different techniques -- for an example, look at the different feel, and the different writing style, between the short story of Lord and Master and the novel I later wrote from the same idea. The short story is actually a chapter in the novel, but when I wrote the short I did it in first person present tense. When I wrote the novel, I did so in third person past tense, which tends work better for longer stories than first person present tense does. I rewrote the short into third person past tense, and that changes the way it reads.