A Chekhov Novella – “A Boring Story”Posted by John Woodington on December 22nd, 2009
I just finished reading Chekhov’s novella “A Boring Story,” and it was wonderful. Subtle, emotional without being sentimental or melodramatic, extremely readable at every page. Really a joy to read. I read it in the collection Lady with Lapdog and other stories, which so far has me engrossed. Chekhov is one of my favorite writers, and may be the person I consider to be the “best” writer of all time. In writing seminars throughout college, I was taught very few hard and fast rules about writing, though there were two that stand out in my mind that should never be broken. They are:
1) You may only use ten (10) exclamation points in your entire career, so use them sparingly.
2) Read Chekhov.
Not only does Chekhov provide a beautiful example of what great writing is and how it is to be accomplished, but he does it in a way that makes a writer want to write more and more, and read more and more of Chekhov’s work in return.
Another thing that this particular collection of Chekhov’s work shows us is that one good way to get a novella published is to include it in a larger collection of short stories. In our lifelong quest to figure out how to publish novellas successfully, this may be the most straightforward way to accomplish the feat. It works well because it can be disguised as a short story, and therefore included in a book-length collection, which a publisher is more willing to go for than a standalone novella.
Many great novellas are contained within the pages of a short story collection, the foremost of which is probably “The Dead” in James Joyce’s great collection Dubliners. In more recent times, Stephen King and Neil Gaiman have both published novellas within collections of short stories, and have done so quite successfully (from a financial perspective).
There are exceptions to the publish-a-novella-in-a-collection-instead-of-as-a-standalone-book, as can be seen by the new novella by Rick Bass, which has been published by Narrative Library. But those are the exceptions.