Use of Separating Fiction into "Parts?"
I was wondering about the use of separating fiction into "parts", similar to chapters but larger and spanning more text and using these to divide up books within a series. If I am unclear, refer to Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Book 2, Hollow City. In this series, the second book is divided into two sections: part 1 and part 2, as well as chapters.
I was wondering where this is done in various works of fiction. I assume within a single stand-alone book it should be fine, but would it still be fine within a series where not all the books are divided into parts that way, such as the Miss Peregrine's book series? How about for a novella? Is it more advisable to keep all the content in one main body than to divide it in a smaller text?
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Stories are made up of incidents. Each incident is a distinct unit of storytelling. Incidents lead the protagonist closer to or further from their goal. Each incident has a structure of its own, its own build and its own payoff. In long works, incidents may themselves be made up of incidents.
Some incidents may be separated from others in time or in space. Some may place the protagonist in different places, circumstances, or with different characters. The larger the break in continuity between scenes, the greater the need for the author to signal the change to the reader.
There are many tools a writer can use to indicate the extent of the break between incidents, for blank lines to paragraphs. to sections, to parts, to books. How many of these you need and of which kind depends on the kind of continuity breaks you need over the full arc of the story.
So, not so much a recommendation as an observation, but the division of a work into large units, such as parts, would seem to be effective where there are large breaks in continuity between incidents.
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