How a novel is built

Story, plot and a whole shape

In Aspects of the Novel, based on the Clark Lectures that E. M. Forster gave at Cambridge in the spring of 1927, a story is defined as a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence. He adds that a story is not the same as a plot. He illustrates plot with the example that the king died, and then the queen died of grief, and says that a plot demands intelligence and memory from the reader as well.^[1]

Much earlier, Aristotle's Poetics, in S. H. Butcher's translation, states that a whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end. The remark appears in Part VII, which concerns the structure of plot. Aristotle was writing about tragedy, so any application to the novel is by extension. This is a pattern that recurs in later theories of structure: ideas formed for the stage are carried over to prose fiction.^[2]

Point of view

A first-person narrator is a self-referential, participating narrator who uses pronouns such as I and me. In second-person narration the narrator recounts experience while addressing you, which adds distance, often ironic, and the reference article stresses that this is not a direct address to the reader. Third-person limited narration refers to characters as he or she and is confined to one character's perspective. An omniscient narrator has an overarching view, seeing and knowing everything that happens, including each character's thoughts and feelings.^[3]

The choice changes what a reader can know. First person creates a close bond with the reader, according to the reference article, while an omniscient narrator can show the inner life of every character. Third-person limited keeps the reader inside one character's knowledge. The sources consulted describe these modes but do not prescribe when each should be used, and this guide does not either.^[3]

Freytag's pyramid and the five-act model

Gustav Freytag published Die Technik des Dramas in 1863. According to the Utrecht University dramaturgy database, he expounded the five-act drama as a model, and the record sets out its stages as exposition, rising action, climax and peripetia, falling action, and dénouement. The diagram later named Freytag's Pyramid is a picture of this rise and fall of tension. The Utrecht record catalogues a 1965 edition and gives 1863 as first publication, and the encyclopedia entry on Freytag gives 1863.^[4][5]

Freytag's subject was drama, specifically the five-act play, so applying the pyramid to a novel is an extension of his idea and not something the sources show him claiming. Whether the five stages describe a particular novel is a matter of judgement, and a novel with several plot lines may not follow a single rise and fall. That observation is a caution about method, not a finding from the sources consulted.^[4]

Three acts and character

The three-act model is associated with Syd Field, who described it in Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (1979). In act one, exposition introduces the main characters and their world, and an inciting incident confronts the protagonist. Act two, also called rising action, shows the protagonist's attempts to fix the problem making things worse, and the protagonist develops, which the article calls a character arc. In act three the story and its subplots are resolved and the climax answers the dramatic question. The article notes that it relies on a single source, so it is best read as a summary and not an authority.^[6]

Forster separated characters into flat and round. The text states that the test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way, and a character who never surprises is flat. The two ideas address different questions: Forster asks how complex a character is, while the arc asks how a character changes across the story. Both concern characterisation, and neither is a rule about how long or how fast a novel should move.^[1][6]

Length

Word count for a novel depends on who is counting. The Nebula Award rules set a novel at 40,000 words or more, a novella at 17,500 words and above but fewer than 40,000, a novelette at 7,500 words and above but fewer than 17,500, and a short story at fewer than 7,500 words. Each of these labels is defined by a simple numerical cut-off, which makes them easy to apply but says nothing about quality.^[7]

These are the rules of one award and are not a universal definition. A threshold set for eligibility tells a reader how a prize classifies a work, not how long a book is expected to be, and other bodies may set other thresholds. Typical lengths by genre, as reported by industry or academic sources, were not found in a source that could be opened and checked for this guide, so none are stated.^[7]