Chapter lengths

If you roughed out a plot and characters without chapter divisions and gave them to ten authors, you'd get each of them writing it as different length chapters. Some writers are more liesurely and like to linger on details. Others like a brisker style and would cover the same plot line in a third the length.

As a reader, you might prefer books to have a certain length of chapter because your own sense of pacing and language fits better with a certain length of chapter. That's also how you'd tend to write it, I'm guessing.

I think the modern use of chapters has something to do with what is possible to write in one go. Each chapter has its own structure that makes it a story within the whole story. John Saul summed it up best, to my mind:

"When I start a book, I always think it's patently absurd that I can write one. No one, certainly not me, can write a book 500 pages long. But I know I can write 15 pages, and if I write 15 pages every day, eventually I will have 500 of them."

are there any books of a certain length, say 250 pages +, with no chapter divisions?

Take a good look at the short chapters and try to imagine them as long as the long ones. IIRC, they're mostly impressionistic and atmospheric and (daringly) they don't advance the plot. I always figured this was Steinbeck's way of showing he could be 'experimental' (which was important for critical success at the time), while not jeopardizing his 'accessibility' to the wider audience of ordinary joes (which was important for sales). It seems to have worked.

no i haven't.

chris casuistry asks a good question.

was hopscotch any good? i bought '42: a model kit' the other month and realised i'd bought the one with the wrong conceit /: haven't read it yet.

hey, this is a highbrow board!

i'm totally unqualified to give you such a list, tom, i don't know anything about postwar poetry. the poets i'm most interested in are williams, berryman, and creeley, all of whom wrote after the war, but i don't really know anything about anyone else.

i liked SRH's answers but i figure there must be others.

Maybe your love has become so pure you don't even want to violate them by reading them.

Bloke made me think about this discussion last night. He has been watching a lot of Deadwood, which has a strange rhythm because it is an HBO programme and so each episode is a full hour long, and there are no ad breaks, so no internal chapters to each episode. When you get used to watching things like House, which is standard 45 minutes with ad breaks, this new rhythm can make you watch a programme in a different way. I think it's the same with books. If a book is tootling along quite happily with a new chapter every ten or twenty pages (or whatever the internal rhythm of the book is), it can be effective to change the chapter length by lenghtening it or shortening it.

I tend to avoid books that have no chapter or section breaks in them, unless they are very short. It usually indicates a deliberate and conscious disregard for the traditional form which is, frankly, just showing off.