Writing the Novel

Chapter 12 Length How long is long enough? Length as a market consideration. Writing the right length for your particular book

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.

If you’re running short, you have several choices. You can reexamine your plot and see if there’s a way to add scenes and complications to it that will give the book more bulk. You can decide that the problem is not in the plot but in the writing, and can accordingly write your scenes so that they run longer, furnishing rather more in the way of dialogue and description. Finally, you can just press on to the end in the manner that seems most comfortable, figuring you’ll add substance one way or another in your second draft.

Your choices are essentially the same if you find your book running long, but here you’d probably be best advised to pick the last option and let the first draft run its course at whatever wordage seems natural. A great many writers do this as a matter of course and produce their best work in this fashion.

Robert Ludlum, for example, almost invariably trims his first draft by a third when he rewrites it. Sidney Sheldon has said that he puts everything he can think of into his first draft, giving his imagination free rein; he commonly cuts more than half of what he has written.

I’m not happy working this way. As I’ve said, I do my best work when I’m operating under the assumption that what I’m writing is going to be set in type as soon as I’ve got the last page written. (One writer, Noel Loomis, was a skilled linotypist, and could compose faster on that machine than on a typewriter; he wrote his westerns on a linotype, pulled galley proofs from the chases of set type, and submitted galleys to his publishers. I’d do that myself if I could.)

I can see, though, a great advantage in writing long and cutting afterward. If you work that way, your first draft contains all the possibilities your creative imagination hands you. Then, when you rewrite, you’re able to skim the cream.

There’s another advantage in writing long. If your book simply works best at a greater length than you had in mind for it, it may have greater commercial value than you planned.

There’s a paradox here that requires a word of explanation. On the one hand, the average thriller runs somewhere around sixty or seventy thousand words, and a book that runs substantially longer than that is going to present problems to a publisher of category fiction.

On the other hand, those occasional thrillers that turn up on the best seller list are generally a hundred to a hundred fifty thousand words long. The same length that would preclude their sale as paperback originals serves to swing them right up onto the hardcover sales counter.

The conventional explanation holds that longer books have more to them, that they have greater depth and stronger story values, that they are more to be taken seriously on account of their length. Because of these factors, such books are said to transcend their categories and appeal to readers who do not ordinarily read that type of novel.

Very often this is demonstrably true. Brian Garfield’s Hard Times is an epic novel of the Old West, with only its setting to link it with standard westerns. Any best seller list will yield similar examples.

Even so, other books turn up on the lists with nothing remarkable about them but their bulk. I read one recently, a detective novel by a writer who has produced some best-selling thrillers over the years. Unlike his other books, this had nothing special going for it; it was a standard straight-line detective plot told from a single point of view and overblown to a hundred fifty thousand words. It was a poorer book for its length, but a better seller because of it.

What it comes down to, I’m afraid, is that readers of best sellers — which is to say the majority of readers in this country — prefer long books. This is their right, certainly, and it is only sensible for the writer who wants to sell to this best seller audience to provide them with what they’re looking for.

It almost seems to be true that there’s no such thing as a book that’s too long to be commercially viable. For years publishers resisted overlong first novels, saying that higher production costs made such books even more unprofitable than trimmer first novels. Nowadays the trend is in the other direction. If a first novel is sufficiently substantial — and of course if it satisfies other commercial considerations as well — then it can be promoted and ballyhooed and even sold.

James Clavell’s novel Shogun had a long run as a best seller a couple of years back. While it was an engrossing reading experience for me all the way through, I could not avoid applying to it Dr. Johnson’s observation regarding Paradise Lost — i.e., no one ever wished it were longer. For all its 1,400 pages, and for all that more readers started it than finished it, the book was a literary and commercial success. Not too many years ago a publisher might have hesitated to bring out quite so long a novel, especially one set in medieval Japan. Clavell’s track record helped, certainly, but equally helpful I suspect was the growing recognition that great length helps more books than it hinders.

Does this mean you should aim from the beginning at long books?

No, not necessarily. It may mean that you shouldn’t try to hit the best seller list with a short book, any more than you should try to peddle a quarter of a million words as a paperback.

But your first object, remember, is to write your own kind of book. You’ll learn, from your own reading and as you begin writing, what sort of book suits you best. I’ve come to see that I myself am most comfortable writing relatively lean, spare volumes. This no doubt limits my potential from a commercial standpoint, but I’d be limiting myself rather more severely were I to force myself to write books that suited me less for purely commercial motives.

That said, it’s worth noting that a great many writers find themselves producing longer books as time goes by. This does not mean that they are attempting to respond to the dictates of the marketplace. While that may be a factor, it’s at least as likely that this extension of their range has simply come about naturally. An intimidating length becomes less intimidating after one has written a batch of short novels.

I could go on. But this chapter, like Abraham Lincoln’s legs, is plenty long enough as it is.

And that’s the long and short of it.