Challenge 88

What is a novel?

The “mags” — such as Analog, Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction — make exact distinctions between “short stories,” “novellas,” “novelettes” and “novels” solely on the basis of word count. Now, writers who are paid by the word take a keen interest in word count. Even so great a genius as Balzac was known for padding his novels — and even inserting advertising — to make a few extra francs. Heaven knows he needed to; his characters frequently calculate monetary transactions, and research has shown something interesting: they’re always wrong. No wonder Balzac was forever going broke.

I’ve never paid any attention to the magazine editors’ arbitrary distinctions. Paying by the word is all well and good, but I see all loss and no gain in reducing perfectly serviceable literary terms to bookkeeping categories.

Very well, then: what is a novel? You’re likely to get as many definitions as there are novelists, but I borrow a concept from drama: if a short story is like a one-act play, then a novella is like a two- or three-act play. And a novel is like a full five-acter. That seems very practical to me.

A scene is much like a paragraph. There’s not likely to be much discussion about where a scene begins or ends. However, an “act” is more like a chapter; it’s a group of scenes, and it can be very elastic: short, medium or long.

But we have to look at each novel in its own terms. Readers who have been following Julian Lawler’s The Prophet of Dreams have long since noticed that the action is not continuous. Rather, it’s episodic, and the links between chapters are sometimes tenuous. The Prophet of Dreams that we have is more like a series of scenes that form the outline of a novel.

At present it will have 13 chapters and an epilogue, and since we’ve been comparing a novel to a five-act play, that gives an average of 2.8 chapters per “act.” Or, if you wish, four “acts” might contain three chapters each and one, two chapters. Or maybe they divide up differently.

Julian Lawler has invited commentary and suggestions. We’d like to help. Here are five questions, all on The Prophet of Dreams:

Does the novel have a discernible structure? As it stands to date — nearly complete as an episodic outline — can it best be divided into five sets of chapters? Three sets? Can you think of any descriptive subtitles for any or all but the last set?
Would you rearrange the order of any of the chapters?
Is magic really necessary to the story? If so, to what extent?
The “shadows” are other-worldly creatures. Does their onslaught come as a kind of natural catastrophe? If so, how could it be made integral to the characters’ individual stories? In short, can the novel be made a classic tragedy on a grand scale rather than a series of personal calamities?
Can you think of a name for “the City”?

Please send us your ideas!

Return to the Readers’ Guide
Return to the issue index