Some genre people, like Algis Budrys, have published treatises where they take this aged idea and expand it to fit novels, or try to make it fit anyway, by adding more reversals and triumphs. I dislike such theories personally, for what that’s worth.

For me, Parts function to separate sections due to time shifts, place shifts, major point of view shifts, or less tangibly-explained shifts based on a change of direction or a major event that, having transpired, throws everything into a new light.

So I might write a Part that runs 40 pages followed by one that runs 200 pages.

What I tend to do beyond chapter breaks — which are more often than not due to switching to one of the other viewpoint characters — is divide the book into sections or parts.

And I’ve come to notice over time that these Parts tend to fall along the lines of the different seasons within a year. Winter itself plays an important role in what the characters can or cannot do in the story, as deep snows or freezes limit the characters ability to travel. Also, the seasons influence the story arcs within the story as each season will naturally have certain events taking place as a part of how the society functions.

To ask a question about Part Length then: If you divide your novel into Parts — if Part 1 is 100 pages, do you feel the need to make each remaining parts of the book about the same length? Or can Part Length within a book or over the course of a series vary widely?

Just to be particularly abstruse: odd-numbered act structures are central to most classic plays. I don’t know why, but even numbers - plays with four acts, say - just don’t seem to work. Prose, on the other hand, seems to demand even numbers, a certain symmetry. Any crackpot theories? I might go and try to work one out now…

Alison, I’m glad to hear from another writer who uses theatrical forms as some element of the metastructure.

Are there extant notes from Dostoevsky showing his breakdowns? Meanwhile, I’m going to have to go check out Austen’s chapter lengths. I never noticed.

These books seem to demand long chapters; as someone said above, it’s about “feel”, the pace of that particular story. But I have sworn that my next book will have no chapter longer than five pages each. I’m tired of writing long chapters. I envy writers who have books with little chapters in them. Jane Austen has no chapter longer than about five pages, and the story whizzes along.

This is a matter of growing into your capacities and away from preconceptions. It reminds me of my adolescent days when in music I took the position that any song less than four minutes long was de facto not worth the bother. That, in fact, songs over ten minutes fell into the “serious” category automatically. Nonsense, of course, but it’s a way of finding a quick and easy solution to a problem that entirely aesthetic and as such requires experience, sensitivity, and confidence.

Each of my chapters is a small story arc made up of one or more scenes. A story arc moves characters and plot from one state to another. Thus, within this arc “something happens” - which sounds fairly obvious, unless you’ve read a lot of beginners’ writing, where whole chapters are devoted to description or world-building or internal monologue that changes nothing. The “something that happens”–the summation of the scenes in the chapter–whether it is a discovery/realization or an encounter or a battle or whatever, must still fit within a larger story arc, serving to ratchet up the tension on the way to a turning point or climax and its denoument. I will often have three or four of these larger, multi-chapter story arcs in a book (sometimes labeled as “parts”, sometimes not.) And, of course, the entire story is a story arc in itself.

As Debbie said, no devices such as artificial cliffhangers or intrusive “predictions” (eg. “that was the worst mistake he ever made.”) are needed to keep the reader engaged if the arc of the chapter has raised the level of tension in the reader. (Which is not to say you can’t leave the characters in a predicament!)

Carol