Form versus Structure
Form can refer to two slightly different things in writing. When you are talking about the form of a piece of writing, you may say it is a poem, a work of prose, a play or something else. Form can also be used in a more specific sense to talk about the way a fictional work is written: a piece of fiction may be in the form of a letter ("Mary" by Edna O'Brien) or a journal (parts of Bram Stoker's Dracula, it may be a series of emails between characters (Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson), or it may even be in verse (Eugene Onegin by Alexander Puskin).
Structure, on the other hand, has more to do with the frame of the fiction. In other words, the structure may involve a single incident or many incidents, there may be a couple of setbacks for the characters or there may be many of them, the climax may be reached early on or later in the piece, there may be a lengthy dénouement after the conflict has been resolved or there may be no dénouement at all, and so on. The work could be a single long third-person narrative, or a series of very short first-person passages from the point of view of different characters, or many other possibilities. These things refer to structure.
Most fiction is categorized as either short stories or novels, with some mid-length work classed as novellas, but what do these words mean? Primarily, these categories refer to length, but they can also indicate differences in structure. In the following discussion I will describe short stories, novellas and novels in terms of both length and structure. Keep in mind that these are generalizations used to conveniently class fiction; all of these categories can overlap in number of words and in structure.
