Chandrasekhar Limit

I decided some of my attitude toward writing as a general endeavor had application here, too:

“Recent exchanges in this facebook venue about chapter length has caused me to think. I mean, for some years now, I have worried about chapter length. Recently, I am stimulated to speculate that, possibly of value, is the notion that there seem to me to be two areas of fiction – genre and everything else. I have read stories that had remarkably consistent chapter length – like to within about 100 words of each other. I am inclined to think that was genre fiction – written according to the requirements of a certain model or style – unnatural. Non-genre fiction makes me think of something in Physics called The Chandrasekhar Limit which says that if a certain type of star gets bigger than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, the very NATURE of that star demands it will cave in. Which then brings up the question: What is the NATURE of non-genre fiction that influences chapter length? I will say, just to be exposing the limits of my mind, that genre fiction, being “written according to the requirements of a certain model or style,” is not of the heart, that genre fiction is artificially assembled as if it were a house built within the parameters of municipal building code(requirements of a certain model or style).

“Non-genre fiction is a feral thing written during the famine-time of a human mind scrounging to feed a heart’s starved vision. How long should the chapters be? How big should the frame of a painting be? Well, how does it feel?”