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Originally Posted by ctg  Very well said, I agree on every word, but it doesn't stop me from talking to the people and provoking them to write, when I know they can write. |
LOL... No, nor I. And I'm all for encouraging promising new writers (of whatever age). But I also think it's important to get that bit of reality out there as a part of the process of winnowing those who will always be amateurs (which is fine -- amateurs do it for the love of the thing, and there's naught wrong with that, in my book -- but they aren't likely to become professionals) and those who will eventually make a career out of their writing.
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ctg is correct when he suggests that writing a novel can be like writing a series of short stories, and I don't believe he meant that as literally as it appears to have been interpreted.
When you come to write your novel, you generally have two options: You can either sit down and start writing straight away, letting your novel meander and evolve as you think of new things, or you can plot it out beforehand and give yourself a roadmap.
Short stories are useful if your approach is the second one. It can be daunting to think "Hell, I have 180,000 words to go," but easier to think "Okay, at 8,000 words per chapter, I have 6,000 left to go on this one." It's also nice and easy to let a "short story" chapter spill out onto the page, within your roadmap, without feeling as though you're losing sight of your target. And if you do change plot mid-chapter, it's easy to go re-write your roadmap.
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As for my responding so literally to ctg's analogy... that's because it can (and therefore likely will) be read that way by a fair number of people, and can prove a stumbling block in that fashion. My point in challenging it was to prevent such a misunderstanding.
However -- to prevent another kind of misunderstanding -- the model you propose is also somewhat misleading, in that both novels and short stories (generally speaking -- there are always the episodic novels mentioned above, etc.) have their own internal logic and structure, and to see a chapter as structurally a short story is a risky undertaking at best; one needs to envision the novel as an entity, regardless of length, just as one does the short story... or you're likely to find yourself falling more and more into the meandering sort of writing that ends up with you painted into corners. If anything, planning is even more important for a novel, because it's far too easy to use the extra space to allow you to wander... and find yourself derailing yourself over and over along the way.
As Chris says, each idea pretty much has its own length, and should be treated accordingly. As an example: I recently read a fair spate of Sheridan Le Fanu's work, including a short piece called "A Passage in the History of an Irish Countess", as well as his novel Uncle Silas. Essentially, they're the same tale, with the same themes, the same characters (with names changed), and the same incidents. But... the short piece, while having some worth of its own, reads as almost as a sketch for the later novel, because the ideas he was dealing with needed room to breathe; the short story form was completely wrong. When he later gave it the novel form, not only did the ideas have room to grow and become all the more powerful, but the rather simplistic villain of the short tale became one of the most memorable, complex, and menacing figures of Victorian fiction in the novel -- even taking on added spiritual dimensions and ambiguity. On the other hand, how many times have we all read more recent novels that were padded short stories because the ideas simply couldn't support that much verbiage? Think, for instance, of Jordan's Wheel of Time, where even the fans of the thing will admit that several books in the series were simply stretched out to the point of even them not caring about what was going on. And so on.
As I said, the above is simply for the sake of clarification, especially for the younger aspirant writers....
As for Ali... sounds as if you've already got a fair idea of where you want to go with this, so good luck, and keep us posted....