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Well said!

As an undergraduate (many, many decades ago!) my sole drive was to write. To understand writing I took a course in aesthetics.  I read John Dewey. He described art as an experience.  This explains my response to a great degree.  I want my reader to experience the lives of my characters.  As such, my characters speak, think, feel, smell, and taste.  Their bodies move and respond to things such as threat or delight. As an artist I am also driven to influence my reader's perception.  In my first novel, my female protagonist had been raped. I was challenged to do this character. I studied rape and its effects on its victims.  I imagined myself as a woman who had been raped and also as a woman whose trust had been betrayed.  Am I a merchant of vicarious experiences? Well yes and so what?  A literary agent from Writers House in New York responded to me by way of rejection, "You certainly are not afraid to challenge yourself or your reader."  To be clear, I think fiction must respond in some way to the life of the reader for it to be believed and accepted as relevant. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Entered a "Best Unpublished Novel" contest.  The reviewers were "Book Lovers" and I believe  readers of commercial fiction. There are rules for commercial fiction and I believe one is to always pitch to the level of your reader. These pitches also include practices such as approximately 85K word length, easy reading prose, and staying with popular genre themes, plot driven novels such as thrillers.  I was bombed badly in the competition although my novel will be published by a conventional publisher some time this year. Hurray!  I do agree that writing fiction that is character based and which involves literary themes requires a bit of insanity.  Call it a functional neurosis.  It's needed for art and to survive all the rejection and ill informed criticism.  One example is the elevation of rhetorical rules above all else. Thanks!

Thank all of you.  I appreciate your willingness to offer an opinion.

I own one text about literary theory, only one. It may surprise you that I do understand your comment.  I do believe that good fiction should inform and entertain. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Do I have a choice?
I would love to develop a readership for my novels. I have a protagonist who struggles with his acceptance of God. I have another who struggles to overcome the devastation of rape.  Another who simply seeks respect.  I also have my Falstaff. I will never develop a readership if I cannot sell.  Thus, I hope I entertain as well as inform.  Markets are what they are.

Charles, I am delighted with your disagreement with me because it opens the door to a fuller discussion. There's something magic involved with plays, movies, and novels.  The real "stage" is the imagination of the viewer, the reader, the guy in the middle seat with a bag of popcorn and a Pepsi.  The playwright is challenged by the physical limitations of the theater.  The movies add movement and fluidity.  In one respect the novel has no limitations but in reality it does. All a novel is is a collection of two dimensional symbols representing words on paper or on a Kindle screen.  The magic is the suspension of disbelief on the part of a member of the audience, his accepting that which is unfolding as real in his imagination. How this relates to chapter length is that anything that draws a reader out of this magical realm destroys the magic. 

Classical literature has enjoyed an evolutionary process.  It is full of trial and error (admittedly the error seldom sees print). A writer should feel free to experiment with chapter length, with syntax, with even POV.  What a writer must always be willing to accept is failure - you tried it and it flopped. You learn.
The metric, the telling dial and needle of failure is the reader's withdrawal from the imaginary world you attempt to create. 

I see words, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters, acts, novels, plays as boxcars, tank cars, gondola cars etc. being pulled by a magnificent Northern type steam locomotive across the Rockies and and Great Plains.  When it all works, you see the drivers churning, you smell the smoke, and the wonderful sound of the four chime whistle lifts your imagination beyond the comfort of your cranium and into space itself.

To the person who posed the question I say, "Experiment!"  But be prepared to accept more failure than success.  TNBW is a good laboratory for experimentation.  As a boy I learned this bit of doggerel, "I cannot blow the whistle, I cannot ring the bell, but when the train jumps the track, I always catch the hell."

Presently am revising a chapter in "Redemption" based on our discussion here.  In this chapter I'll introduce Ann, the shipbuilder's daughter.  She's very forward as well as being quite young.  I am presented with a problem, it takes nearly a year to construct a vessel such as the Charles W. Morgan at Mystic Seaport. Alva has to do something during this time to avoid idly burning up his savings living ashore (on the beach).  So he ships out.  The details of the ship's construction come from Ann's letters.

Ann also solves a problem. Reaction to the Prologue in "Redemption" has been very negative - Alva's a dirty old man, a voyeur.  He needs a character ARC.
Ann will help show how Alva goes from good, then to bad, and then to being redeemed.  All of this within the novel's theme - the power of love.

I am very grateful for your comments.  It may not surprise you that I am a Melville fan since childhood.  In the draft chapter I'm working on, Alva has finally saved enough resources to buy his own ship.  He goes to see a Quaker shipbuilder to purchase his vessel.  There he meets the shipbuilder's daughter.  Since she too is Quaker, she has more equality than other contemporary women. She does "women's" work and also the work of skilled male craftsman.  I have her propose marriage to Alva.  I'm thinking now of portraying the ship's construction from her POV. 
The ship is a symbol of the character and culture of New England Quakers.  Something built to do a job, to sail to the far regions of the world, to stand in harms way, and to return men home safely for decade after decade.  The nature of the description of this vessel will emphasize the quality of her construction and the great skill of her builders.  She, the Providence, is a symbol and is readily seen as loved almost as a person.

Your original comments have me thinking.  My writing will not please everyone.  This is really very liberating. I can experiment with technique and should. Melville did this.  Moby Dick ruined him financially, but later generations discovered it as a masterpiece of literature. I'm not so vain as to expect that but I am an existentialist.

BTW: Is English a second language? If so I'll think of Joseph Conrad as I read you.

You are correct. One of the many, many rejections I had from literary agents about "Down Easter" stated that I am not afraid to challenge myself or my readers.

While I may not make a fortune, I should feel free to experiment with plot and universal issues.

We discussed painting briefly, your sunrise.  When possible, I like to use word techniques similar in goal to the impressionist painters.  What follows is the reaction of my 16 year old protagonist in "Down Easter" after he climbs to the top of the main mast on his ship for the first time.  He overcomes his fear of heights.

"Priest's mind outpaced his eyes because he saw a sky not simply blue, but blue with tints of pink; he saw clouds floating upward in shades of white, gold, and orange; he saw yellow and white sunlight flecks dancing between the waters swell as it moved in rising crests down river to lap on the shore.  He was exultant; he was alive, as if he had just become immortal.  He was euphoric.  The pounding of his heart from the exhaustion of having climbed 130 feet and the consumption of air by his heavy breathing simply lent rhythm and pitch to his joy."

I hope you enjoyed my little excursion.  I need to read more of your work.  It's no chore at all.

Thanks, Temple