Formatting of Short Chapters

I've seen some one sentence chapters used in non-fiction when it was done for effect, but, personally I would find one paragraph or one sentence chapters in a work of fiction to be quite annoying. I can also see a publisher being concerned with what could be a 285 page book turned into a 500 page book. Just my thoughts.

But, yeah, if it's a new chapter, it's a new chapter, regardless of length.

I have recently read 'The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' in which the author, Laurence Stern, broke almost every existing industry standard of the mid 1750's. When one of the characters dies early in the book there follows two completely blank black pages.

Fantastic . . .

It makes me wonder how restrictive the industry has become nowadays with regards to originality.

Lifelongdagger said:

I have recently read 'The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' in which the author, Laurence Stern, broke almost every existing industry standard of the mid 1750's. When one of the characters dies early in the book there follows two completely blank black pages.

Fantastic . . .

It makes me wonder how restrictive the industry has become nowadays with regards to originality.

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I don't think it's the industry, but readers. Nor do I think either is against originality per se, it's just that originality can be every bit as bad, or worse, than lack of originality. Originality sometimes means good, but often means horrible.

I don't know that any hard and fast rules really existed in the mid-1750's, novel writing was still on infant legs, and I'm not sure any exist today, except for what works and what doesn't, and the publishing industry has about 250 years more experience in learning what readers will and won't buy.

I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with very short chapters, but one after another would get highly annoying, unless the shortness was done for a very good reason, and executed perfectly.

I completely agree with your comments on originality James, but being new to this novel writing game, I would be interested if you think that the term 'industry standard' primarily incorporates business standard or literary standard, and does this impact upon the viability of originality -

the good stuff, not the rubbish . . . .

jl1966ca said:

It seems to me that this would take away from the visual layout of the manuscript and it would be very annoying to have pages with only one or two lines on them.

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I'm all for short chapters but so many short chapters next to each other would drive me crazy. (Admittedly it's not a long trip.)

Stephen King does it all the time. He doesn't do a hard page break, though, but he doesn't do that even for his lengthy chapters. It's an interesting effect.