NOVEL, n. A short story padded.
A novel is a book with a lot of pages.
What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.
A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.
The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.
That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.
Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
'The Cauliflower' is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword.
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
To be a classic, a novel should be original.
I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.
Publishers love to compartmentalize, and 'Second Chance' was not an easy novel to define.
A romance novel is more than just a story in which two people fall in love. It's a very specific form of genre fiction. Not every story with a horse and a ranch in it is a Western; not every story with a murder in it is a mystery; and not every book that includes a love story can be classified as a romance novel.
