If It Bleeds

Traditionally, the novella form allows writers to explore expanded story ideas without the need for elaborate plotting or character backstory common in novels. This gives the novella writer the appropriate narrative space to focus on a few characters while providing space for more elaborate plots and longer timeframes than those typical of the short story.

Stephen King has sometimes used the novella to experiment with his approaches to storytelling. His first collection of novellas, Different Seasons (1982), was published with the intention of demonstrating his versatility. Best known for writing horror fiction at the time, King wanted to prove that he could write stories in other genres, such as the crime drama (“Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”), the psychological thriller (“Apt Pupil”), and the coming-of-age story (“The Body”). His third novella collection, Hearts in Atlantis (1999), is composed of stories that are all loosely connected, focusing on the lives of characters who grow up in the United States through the 1960s and ’70s.

King also uses the novella to focus on a particular theme or motif. As the title of Different Seasons suggests, each of the novellas in King’s first collection corresponds to a different season of the year.