jdparadise said:
What makes me nervous is that, by limiting (or stretching) to a particular number, a writer may avoid (or artificially include) subplots, theme extensions, and characters, under- or over-write for the reader's needs...
Actually, it's in trying to avoid under or over-writing that I came about this rather peculiar method I have for writing novels. I know of no other writer who does it the way I do (though Michael Moorcock comes closest). Believe me, this is not the first time I've heard, "But how can you write to rule like that?" Well, I'll tell you how.
When I first sat down to commit an act of writing with intent, the first chapter I ever seriously wrote came to 12 thousand words. So, naturally, I decided to keep it regular and write all the chapters of that novel at 12 thousand words. That was my first big mistake. The thing is, that first chapter aside, I couldn't write chapters of 12 thousand words and make them coherent. I kept introducing long digressions, lectures, pointless sub-plots, and other stretching techniques just to fill out the space. By the end of chapter three I had so many characters and loose plot threads that my story collapsed into an impenetrable junkheap of incoherence and confusion. I had to scrap the whole thing and start over.
I asked myself, if 12 thousand words is too long, what exactly is my natural length as a writer? How many words are enough to cover all the details of plot, character, setting, and imagery I need to bring the story to life? Also, how many words are few enough that I have no temptation at all to pad? That was the start of a long process of trial and error. I tried writing in blocks of 5 thousand words, 3 thousand, 2 thousand, 1 thousand, 8 hundred, and 5 hundred. In the end, I settled on 1 thousand words, because 8 hundred word blocks caused me to write a little too sparsely, and 2 thousand word blocks were just long enough to hang myself with. I've written in blocks of 1 thousand words ever since. Of course, I give myself breathing room there. It's very rare for me to come within 10 words of that target, but the thing is, it all averages out in a novel length work, and I can be confident of writing to within a thousand words of my target.
The thing is, there is no right or wrong way to write a novel. You have to do the work yourself, and come up with your own method that emphasises your strengths and minimises your weaknesses. As for me, I've played and written music for 20 years. From that, I've learned how to be creative -- and how to improvise -- within the rigid limits of keys, progressions, and song structures. That's as natural to me as breathing now. But I have also learned how to tackle it from the other end, and make the structure serve the muse of music... or of writing, for that matter.
Building and tweaking structures is the particular strength I bring to this whole business of writing novels. Now, since I write in blocks of 1 thousand words, that's the level I want to be thinking at when I'm writing my first draft. I want to be able to concentrate on the present block of 1 thousand words, and how that relates to the last block, and to the next block. I don't want to be distracted from that by having to worry about where the story as a whole is going. So, for me, the natural thing to do is to build a structure that sits above my thousand word blocks and organises them into a coherent novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and rising dramatic tension to carry the reader right the way through.
You can join three blocks of a thousand words into a single coherent progression, and that gives me a 3 thousand word chapter. I can go one better, and do 5 thousand word chapters in the same way, or I can use a block by itself for a short, 1 thousand word chapter. I can organise chapters into parts of 17 thousand words each. Five parts of 17 thousand words gives me the 85 thousand words I mentioned above. But I can break it down any number of ways, to arrive at pretty much any word count I would care to name. So, of course, when someone asks me how long a novel is going to be, my natural response is "How long do you want it?"
When I have a story idea, the first thing I do is break it down into five equal parts, or three, or whatever the structure dictates. If a story idea falls more naturally into three equal parts than into five, then I'll use a structure based on threes for preference. But in practice, I haven't yet met with an idea that I can't break down into any number of parts I want. It's no big deal for me to think up a dozen ways I can break a general story idea into five steps, or to then turn around and think up a dozen more ways to break it into three steps. When Uncle Jim or anyone else talks about writing a story as large as it needs to be, it doesn't compute for me. That's just not how I work. I make a distinction between ideas fit for short stories, as opposed to ideas fit for novels. But whether a novel is 60 thousand words or 120 thousand, just depends on how I decide to break it down. It has no impact at all on all the creative stuff with characters and imagery and so forth, which for me is all happening when I sit down to write a 1 thousand word block.
"Formula fiction!" you interject? Pfft. As far as I'm concerned, the main thing wrong with formula fiction is how crude and unsubtle the formulas generally are. Structuring is my thing. I know how to use syncopation and asymmetry in such a way that you would never know you were reading formula fiction, until a mathematician points it out to you. I know how to build structures that become an integral part of the artistic expression, in the same way that exposed structural members are integral to aesthetics of modern architecture. I know how to use chaos theory and emergent properties to build a complex, reactive structure that almost behaves as though it was a living thing. I can turn "formula" into a virtue, and I can do it without disturbing the primary task of telling a story, because it's hidden away as an elaboration of the basic scaffolding of a regular novel. This is my strength, remember. This is the unique perspective I bring to this business of writing novels.