Why Novellas?
Why novellas?
Here’s the truth: I’ve never written a novella before this point in my life. I think in long form. I luxuriate in the ample time and space to fully develop characters, to immerse a reader in a story world.
So what made me decide to issue the story of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s beautiful, talented rival—Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun—in a series of six novellas called Behind the Painted Fan instead of as another full-length book?
I wish I had a simple answer. Partly it’s because I didn’t want her story to compete on the same stage as Adélaïde’s, which only came out on August 30 of this year. At the same time, I wanted to give readers the opportunity to see Elisabeth’s side of things, to see the fascinating, treacherous world of pre-Revolutionary Paris from a different artist’s perspective.
And I felt as if I owed it to Elisabeth to put flesh on her as more than a rival of another woman artist, which is how she appears in The Portraitist.
In truth, I had enough material written to make another complete novel. But I also saw that Elisabeth’s journey divided neatly into six segments. Plus, I was curious. Could I do it? Could I make six shorter manuscripts hang together? Would a series be more interesting or less? Actually, it wasn’t such a big departure from writing a whole book. But something about the bite-sized nature of it made it less daunting for me, too.
The question of whether the series works as a series is still up in the air, and the novellas remain a sort of grand experiment. I had a great deal of fun creating them, and I hope readers enjoy dipping into Elisabeth’s story either before or after reading The Portraitist.
At this time, only the first three parts are published as e-books. The final three will be available by the end of the year. But members of my email community have free access to the first four as of today, and will have the final two before they are available to the public.
I’d very much love to hear from readers about how they felt about the novellas. I’m open to feedback and candid opinions, for sure. How else can we grow as writers? And I’ll always have the option down the road of putting them all together and issuing a full-length novel.
So, let me know! And I hope you enjoy following Elisabeth’s exciting journey from young teen to Marie Antoinette’s official portraitist to member of the Académie Royale—and ultimately to exile in the courts of Europe.
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Susanne Dunlap is the author of twelve works of historical fiction for adults and teens, plus a series of novellas about the 18th-century painter Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, as well as an Author Accelerator Certified Book Coach. Her love of historical fiction arose partly from her studies in music history at Yale University (PhD, 1999), partly from her lifelong interest in women in the arts as a pianist and non-profit performing arts executive. Her novel The Paris Affair won first place in its category in the CIBA Dante Rossetti awards for Young Adult Fiction.
The Musician’s Daughter was a Junior Library Guild Selection and a Bank Street Children’s Book of the Year, and was nominated for the Utah Book Award and the Missouri Gateway Reader’s Prize. In the Shadow of the Lamp was an Eliot Rosewater Indiana High School Book Award nominee. Susanne earned her BA and an MA (musicology) from Smith College, and lives in Biddeford, ME, with her little dog Betty.
Follow her on Twitter @Susanne_Dunlap
BEHIND THE PAINTED FAN
Her father taught her how to paint—and then he died.
Prodigiously talented Elisabeth has been bred on art as long as she can remember, sitting at her fan-painter-father’s feet among the most famous artists of the day. When her father dies and her mother remarries the miserly Jacques Le Sèvre, she fights to keep her dream of becoming a portraitist alive. With the help of her godfather Gabriel Doyen, and her friend Rosalie Bocquet, she lays the groundwork for her future and as a beautiful teenager, becomes the darling of the Paris salonistes.
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Join Susanne’s email community and read the first 4 novellas for free!
Category: On Writing
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