PT Short Story Word Count

Word Count in Short Stories (Conto)

Most editorial markets follow the length categories set by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA): flash fiction (< 1,000 words), short story (1,000–7,500), novelette (7,500–17,500), novella (17,500–40,000) and novel (40,000+). For reading time, use T = W / 250, which gives minutes at a pace of 250 wpm.

Brazilian short fiction has a rich canon across all of these tiers. Machado de Assis’s “A Cartomante” (1884) sits around 3,500 words, a model of the realist short story; Lygia Fagundes Telles’s “Venha Ver o Pôr-do-Sol” comes in near 4,200; Murilo Rubião’s fantastic tales such as “O Ex-Mágico” sit around 2,000; and Clarice Lispector’s pared-down contos in “Laços de Família” fall between 1,500 and 5,000. Rubem Fonseca went shorter, 1,000 to 3,000, in “Feliz Ano Novo” (1975), and Dalton Trevisan squeezed things further still into his “ministories”.

Flash fiction, the “microconto”, does well on Brazilian platforms like Wattpad and Medium PT. The famous Hemingway six-word story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”) marks the lower bound of the form. Twitter/X gave rise to the “twitteratura” movement, where authors like Marcelino Freire published under 280 characters. Editorial markets draw their own lines too: literary magazines such as Granta and Piáuí buy in the 3,000–7,500 range, while genre zines like Mafagafo and Trasgo lean toward 2,000–5,000.

Applications

Aim submissions at Brazilian literary magazines (Piáuí, quatrocincoum, Mafagafo, Trasgo, Estranhos Contos), enter short-fiction contests (Prêmio Jabuti de Conto, Sesc de Literatura), prep work for creative-writing workshops (Estado da Arte, Imaginauta), back up academic studies of Machado, Clarice, Rubião, Dalton Trevisan and Hilda Hilst, or estimate reading time for podcasts and audiobook narration of short fiction.

FAQ

What separates a conto from a novella? SFWA puts the line at 17,500 words. Cross it and the work becomes a novella (novela in Portuguese). The deeper difference is structural: a conto holds to one dramatic situation, with unity of action, time and place, whereas a novella has room for plot branches and subplots even if it stays shorter than a novel.

How is microconto different from flash fiction? Both stay under 1,000 words, but the Brazilian “microconto” (popularized by Marcelino Freire and Marina Colasanti) usually runs under 100 words, often a single paragraph, while English flash fiction allows up to 1,000. The shortest Brazilian microcontos in print come in at 6–30 words.

Does word count affect submission acceptance? It does. Most Brazilian literary magazines spell out strict word-count limits in their submission guidelines (chamadas), and a story that lands outside the window gets rejected automatically. Read the chamada first, every time.