I’ve Created Two New Literary Terms!

I think I may have coined a brand-new literary term!

“Chronovel.”

In fact, maybe two terms:

“Novignette.”

What the heck am I talking about?

Well, in going back over the manuscript my agent had returned to me, I wondered if the editors who read it and subsequently passed on it had thought that it might have been a short story collection. But even if that wasn’t the case, I wondered about the structure and format of my manuscript–soon, hopefully, a book–and how to alert readers into the slightly…askew…structure I had taken in creating it.

During a walk it hit me: Chronovel. Novignette!

In writing this post, I found that there is a similar term, that already exits, called a “fix-up” or “fixup” novel. These are stand-alone short stories that were “fixed up” in order to be fit into a novel.

This is not what I did.

On January 29, 2024, at 8:20 a.m. (Mountain Time), I e-mailed my agent the following that I had added into the Front Matter of the manuscript:

“I loved the theme, the structure, the imagination of The Martian Chronicles (TMC) so much that I’d wanted to try my hand at a work of similar construction. This is that effort. I am terming it a ‘chronovel,’ which is a combination of ‘chronicle’ (Merriam-Webster: ‘a historical account of events arranged in order of time usually without analysis or interpretation’) and ‘novel’ (‘an invented prose narrative . . . ‘). These are not intended as individual short stories, but as a constructed ‘chronicle of events’ involving vignettes (perhaps also a ‘novignette‘?) and a common plot, as is the structure of TMC. Unlike TMC, however, all of these works were intentionally created with encyclopedic intent. There is much intentionally left to the imagination between each work, as well as much portrayed within each work.”

I did some browser searches on my terms and nothing had come up, so I feel that I am the first to coin these two terms. These two terms are used when intentionally creating stories in a “chronicle form” to fit into an intentionally created novel. They are intentional vignettes intentionally stitched together in the form of a novel. There is nothing accidental nor haphazard about them. Think of it as diary entries from Life showing the high and low points of Life, but not every little, expanded, fleshed-out scene, as most novels try to do.

So, I am here, for the record, recording my creation of these terms!

Feel free to use as appropriate, while giving proper attribution!