Lawrence Block - Writing the Novel

For a particularly well-crafted example of a novel in which several temporal phases of a story are simultaneously related, you might have a look at Some Unknown Person, by Sandra Scoppettone. The book is based on the life and death of Starr Faithfull, the star-crossed girl-about-town who served as a model for Gloria Wandrous in John O‘Hara’s Butterfield Eight. Scoppettone interweaves her lead character’s early years, the life story of a man instrumental in her death, the events leading up to her death, the last days years later of the aforementioned man, and several other aspects of the story, cutting back and forth through time in a most instructive fashion.

In Threesome, one of Jill Emerson’s characters wants to know how long a chapter ought to be. As long as Abraham Lincoln’s legs, another character assures her. (Lincoln, you may recall, informed a heckler that a man’s legs ought to be long enough to extend from his body to the ground.)

A chapter, then, should be long enough to reach from the one before it to the one that follows it. In other words, there is no fit and proper length for a chapter.

When I wrote sex novels, I tended to be compulsive about chapter length. Originally my books were two hundred pages long, and were written in the form often twenty-page chapters. Then, when my publisher complained that they were running a wee bit short, I upped the length to 205 pages, alternating twenty-one page chapters with twenty-page chapters and stopping when I had written five of each. In retrospect, I can see readily enough that this rigidity was pointless insofar as the reader was concerned. I’m positive my average fan, busy turning the pages with one hand and panting over the lurid innuendo, barely realized that the book was divided into chapters in the first place. In his mind, it was more conveniently divided into hot parts and dull stretches.

Now that the books I write no longer contain hot parts, I’m a good deal more flexible in dividing the dull stretches into chapters. In a series of four novels written about (and ostensibly by) Chip Harrison, I furnished each book with one chapter a single sentence in length. “The gun jammed,” for instance, was an entire chapter in No Score; “Chip, I’m Pregnant” was a similarly complete chapter in Chip Harrison Scores Again. The two other books each contained an equally terse chapter. I did this sort of thing for the fun of it, not for any particular effect.

If I’m less compulsive about chapter length nowadays, I still tend to keep the chapters of a particular book roughly the same length. An occasional chapter shorter than its fellows provides a sort of staccato effect that is not without dramatic value. When you break for a chapter you’re slamming a door on the action. The reader has to pause and think for a moment, if only for the length of time it takes him to turn the page.

Some books aren’t divided into chapters at all. The author just skips an extra space between scenes and lets it go at that. An advantage of chapter breaks — that they provide a convenient place for the reader to stop — is also their disadvantage, in that the reader may elect not to pick the book up again. Some writers avoid chapter breaks because they don’t want to encourage the reader to pause in the course of their heart-pounding narrative. One might argue in reply that a story that’s all that gripping will hold its readers through a chapter break. In my own reading, I’ve found that chapterization tends to keep me reading. I tell myself I can stop in a few minutes, at the end of the next chapter, and I keep telling myself that until I’ve finished the book.

One function of chapters is that they reduce the book in the writer’s own eyes to manageable dimensions. If your prior experience is with short stories, you may find it easier to imagine yourself writing a three or four or five thousand-word chapter than a full-length novel. By parcelling your book into such bite-sized portions the task of writing it may seem within your abilities. A chapter can be grasped all at once as a book frequently cannot, and of course when you’ve written twenty or thirty chapters of this sort, you’ll have produced a novel.

Another use of chapters is for viewpoint shifts — which is not to say that every change in point of view calls for a new chapter. In Not Comin’ Home To You, written under the Paul Kavanagh pen name, the viewpoint shifts back and forth between the two leads, who see the emerging story very differently. Breaking chapters for these viewpoint shifts prepares the reader better than simple double spacing.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the manner in which you do or don’t divide your novel into chapters is not something that will have any discernible effect upon a publisher’s decision to accept or reject your book. It’s not too likely he’ll care one way or the other, but if he does it’s the easiest sort of change for him to suggest, and the easiest change for you to make. For this reason, whether you use chapters and how long you make them is a minor point at most and one you should arrange to suit yourself while you write the book.

The length of your chapters may not be important. The length of your novel is.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, a novel’s like a chapter. It should be long enough to get from the beginning to the end. But length is rather more rigidly determined on the basis of various commercial considerations which a novelist neglects at his peril.

As far as category fiction is concerned, length is largely predetermined. If you want to write a light romance for Harlequin, let’s say, you’ll probably have noticed that all the Harlequin romances on the newsstands run the same number of pages and have the same number of words on a page. If the books all run fifty-five thousand words and you submit an eighty thousand-word manuscript, the likelihood of their accepting your novel is considerably diminished.

Not all length requirements in category novels are equally strict. Most houses might try a longer-than-usual gothic mystery or western if they felt its strengths were such as to offset the disadvantage of its unusual length. But you’re swimming against the tide when you try this sort of thing. It’s hard to sell a first novel without increasing the difficulty by failing to conform to market requirements in this area.

If your book’s too long, an editor may still like it enough to suggest cuts. If it’s too short, you’ve really got a problem. With a handful of very obvious exceptions, really short books really don’t sell. It may not be impossible to write a novel in less than fifty thousand words, but it’s evidently very tricky to convince the reader that he’s getting his money’s worth. Nor is an editor as likely to feel comfortable suggesting ways to beef up a book as he may feel suggesting deletions.

How do you make sure your book’s the right length? We’ll assume that your market study has led you to select an ideal length. You want to write a mystery, say, and a study of the type of mystery you intend to write indicates that the most successful books tend to run in the neighborhood of sixty-five to seventy thousand words. You’ve calculated that, given the way you set your margins and other quirks of style, you’ll need to write 225 pages to come in at the optimum length.

Outlining’s a help in giving you a sense of the relationship between your plot and your predetermined length. It makes it easier for you to see how much should happen within the first fifty or hundred pages in order for things to be working out on schedule. Even without an outline, it’s frequently possible to sense as you go along whether you’re running long or short.