Lengths and Forms

After the discussion with my writing group about reading series, which I wrote about in a previous post, I kept thinking about story lengths, and the forms into which we put the stories we write.  We have labels we apply to certain types of stories – short stories, novellas, novels, series – and certain expectations attached to each, from both publishers and readers.  Working within those forms is part of managing reader expectations, which is a key component of making a story appeal to a given reader, but the expectations we have around form and length of stories are not derived from some optimization method synchronized with humanity’s ability to interact with literature.

Some of the lengths and forms we are accustomed to arise from physical limitations of the book-binding process.  The Lord of the Rings is considered to be one “book” split up into three “volumes” for easier reading and publication, but it stands as a prime example of the trilogy form, and the divisions between the volumes come at points where there is a reasonable stopping point in the plot.  The most recent Stormlight Archive installment, Wind and Truth, was trimmed by some twenty thousand words so that the book binder would be able to bind the book properly.  Novellas were traditionally difficult to publish because they were as expensive to print and prepare as a full-length novel, but couldn’t be sold for as much – that’s one of the major reasons novellas have surged in popularity with the rise of e-readers and digital media, and why many of them are still published in a digital-only form, unless they become exceptionally popular or are from a big-name author (modern attention spans may also be a contributing factor).

Yet, digital technology largely frees us from the tyranny of the physical preparation of a book.  Between reader expectations, the legacy of print formats, and the need for publishing in multiple formats, most published works continue to comply with the basic ideas of lengths and forms which have become mostly standard in the past century and a half (or so).  And that probably makes sense, from a publication stand-point, but even when I’m not writing something with an eye towards publication, I find myself writing to certain lengths and patterns, keeping an eye on the word count to guide about how long a scene should be, how long a chapter should be, when I should think about switching viewpoints or along what rhythm I should be aligning my major plot points.  That’s probably the engineer in me, but I doubt I’m the only one who writes within the forms to which we are accustomed.

It is difficult to buck those forms, consciously or unconsciously, because they are integrated into every story we’ve read, and therefore we tend to imagine stories that fall along similar lines.  Among the few works I’ve seen which almost whole-heartedly buck traditional storytelling forms is The Wandering Inn, which is a massively long “web serial.”  Its chapters vary from ordinary chapter lengths to full-on novel length (for a single chapter), and they’re sometimes organized into arcs, sometimes cover a whole arc within one chapter.  Sometimes the chapters are focused on a single viewpoint, or a handful, others bounce around to dozens.  There are volumes, but the volumes are more of extended arcs.  Some chapters or groups of chapters are separate stories which do not directly advance any central plot – indeed, it can be difficult to identify precisely what the central plot is, at times – I’d say it takes a few volumes to really grasp its real shape.  Despite the length of many chapters, individual scenes within a chapter are often quite brief.  In all, it is a fine testament to how, in a digital medium, these terms we use – scenes, chapters, books, volumes – are not so definitive.  They can all just be thought of as divisions, and the author places those divisions where the story wants them, not where traditional storytelling ideas might say they “should” be.

These lengths and forms we use, though, are not entirely arbitrary.  When we write, we are writing so that someone can someday read what we wrote, and the first and foremost consideration in these matters should be how it influences the reader experience of the story.  Scene breaks give a reader a moment to pause and signal a shift of some kind, be it of perspective, location, or something else.  Breaking a story into chapters provides natural resting points for the reader and can signal the passage of time or of events which don’t need to be included in the story and can happen “off stage” as it were – we certainly don’t need to write about every time a character eats or takes a nap.  A story is not a literal record of events.  Including components like prologues, interludes, and epilogues are tools to help provide additional context and sometimes tell smaller stories which help make the larger story more meaningful or bring certain aspects of it into higher resolution than they might gain from the attentions of the main storyline(s).  The point is not that these lengths and forms are not useful, but to recall that word count is more of a guideline, a place to start, not a destination.

We’ve said versions of much of this in previous posts here on the site, but I was prompted to think about it further in thinking about the series discussion.  When it comes to breaking a story up into multiple books, most of us have probably read examples of instances where the break feels natural, like each book is a self-contained story that together build into a larger narrative, and others where the breaks between books feel arbitrary and forced, as if a single story was simply split up into acceptable book-like lengths.  Wheel of Time contains examples of both kinds of divisions, with many of the early books embodying the former, while several of the middle books (especially books nine and ten) are more the latter.  When each book can be a self-contained story that comes to a logical and mostly complete conclusion, while contributing to some larger plot, I think that is an appropriate use of book breaks and series, but when the division is more arbitrary, I would rather see the whole story presented as a single book, even if it can only be done continuously in a digital form, and must be, perhaps, broken into volumes for the print version.

These structural elements of storytelling rarely receive much attention in discussions of writing, but they are the infrastructure on which we are building our stories.  It would be folly to design and create a building without consideration for the dimensions of its rooms and hallways and staircases – these elements of length and form fill much the same role in storytelling that dimensions do in architecture.  Typical word counts are a little like the guidelines in Human Dimension and Interior Space – not absolutes or rules, but a place from which to start and from which to adapt to suit a particular purpose.  In our case, that purpose is to tell a story that someone will enjoy reading.