“The only hope for a Golden Age, anymore, is being ignored. Bluntly, the novella is in its Golden Age as a form right now because no one is beating it with a stick until nickels fall out. So my plan for the novella is — drum roll: Do nothing. Or do whatever little is required to steward the status quo. Let’s agree, shall we, to keep throwing around the inane term Great American Novel, and to never, ever utter the phrase Great American Novella. Let’s agree not to remind California what it used to take for granted, that novellas, because of their length, can often be more handily adapted than novels into movies. Let us not remind New York what all the avid and demanding among us take for granted, that a volume of three novellas is more intriguing than one flabby novel. Let us downplay the novella in casual conversation. Writers, if you have a can’t-miss commercially viable yarn a-brewing, be good enough to stretch it into a short novel or compress it into a long story. And look, let’s keep the novella for ourselves, the adults. We deserve something, don’t we? Let’s free the novella of prizes and awards and citations and all manner of gold star. Let’s fail to educate our students about the novella, fail to convince them of its charms. That way, we need never be nostalgic for the Golden Age of the novella. We’ve got something they don’t want, a noncommodity, and we need to look out for it.”

Adapted from “The Three-Day Weekend Plan,” an essay by John Brandon in “The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books” (Soft Skull, 2011).