Length Matters
A good friend of mine is always keen to point out the size of my blog entries. He's used to reading encapsulations and blurbs instead of sentences and paragraphs formed into a cohesive something. I think he probably misses Ziggy cartoons; Peanuts can get so involved in four panels. Forget about the Sunday comics.
I ask him about the readability (for lack of a better word) and how easy, and coincidentally fast, that makes the entries. He has no answer; some of them are just too long for him to read. This is especially interesting to me because it is so opposed to how I think.
My first Dick Francis book was a supermarket paperback of Proof. I enjoyed it immensely and gave it to my father to read. His verdict: It was easy to read. I was disappointed in this because
it's always a disappointment to recommend something to someone who doesn't like it as well as you do. Worse, though, he made it sound as though the book were suitable for a third grade remedial reading class.
Eventually I realized that this wasn't how he meant it at all. The book made no undue demands upon the reader's vocabulary, it was clear and fast paced, there weren't long digressive discourses on societal ills; it was just as my dad said, easy to read. It turns out I think this is a good thing.
Moby Dick is not easy to read. You've got to work for that one, the same as other classics like Les Miserables, a book that tries to do more than merely entertain. Other books are not easy to read because they're poorly written. I picked up three books by a southern gentlemen (based on a starred review in Publishers Weekly, silly me) that I find impossible to read because of the writing style. Everything in the books is over-described, not just the things that are important to plot and story, but every damn noun and setting in each scene. I trudged through one, gave up on the second, will donate the third to the library.
This is not to say that being easy to read is a sign of quality. By itself it is most definitely not. Stephen King's good books are easy to read but so are his not so good ones. When I read my first King book I was struck by how you can sit down with it for twenty minutes and find yourself turning page 100.
Sometimes I want to be immersed in heavy, atmospheric, sometimes large casted serious novels, something like Robert Wilson's A Small Death in Lisbon or what may be the ulitmate, James Clavell's Shogun. Or an Eric Ambler book, or a Graham Greene. I have high hopes in this regard for Alan Furst, whose Night Soldiers I just picked up.
Whether a book is easy to read or requires more intellectual involvement it still has to primarily entertain and no matter what, never commit the sin of allowing the writing to get in the way of the story. I do regard the label of being easy to read as complimentary and enjoy it when I hear people say that of my work. I think it helps excuse the wordiness, which, if done right, should go unnoticed during the actual reading of the piece. It's necessary but not cumbersome and should never earn the epithet of wordy.
And on that note, I sure the hell better stop writing.
I ask him about the readability (for lack of a better word) and how easy, and coincidentally fast, that makes the entries. He has no answer; some of them are just too long for him to read. This is especially interesting to me because it is so opposed to how I think.
My first Dick Francis book was a supermarket paperback of Proof. I enjoyed it immensely and gave it to my father to read. His verdict: It was easy to read. I was disappointed in this because
it's always a disappointment to recommend something to someone who doesn't like it as well as you do. Worse, though, he made it sound as though the book were suitable for a third grade remedial reading class.
Eventually I realized that this wasn't how he meant it at all. The book made no undue demands upon the reader's vocabulary, it was clear and fast paced, there weren't long digressive discourses on societal ills; it was just as my dad said, easy to read. It turns out I think this is a good thing.
Moby Dick is not easy to read. You've got to work for that one, the same as other classics like Les Miserables, a book that tries to do more than merely entertain. Other books are not easy to read because they're poorly written. I picked up three books by a southern gentlemen (based on a starred review in Publishers Weekly, silly me) that I find impossible to read because of the writing style. Everything in the books is over-described, not just the things that are important to plot and story, but every damn noun and setting in each scene. I trudged through one, gave up on the second, will donate the third to the library.
This is not to say that being easy to read is a sign of quality. By itself it is most definitely not. Stephen King's good books are easy to read but so are his not so good ones. When I read my first King book I was struck by how you can sit down with it for twenty minutes and find yourself turning page 100.
Sometimes I want to be immersed in heavy, atmospheric, sometimes large casted serious novels, something like Robert Wilson's A Small Death in Lisbon or what may be the ulitmate, James Clavell's Shogun. Or an Eric Ambler book, or a Graham Greene. I have high hopes in this regard for Alan Furst, whose Night Soldiers I just picked up.
Whether a book is easy to read or requires more intellectual involvement it still has to primarily entertain and no matter what, never commit the sin of allowing the writing to get in the way of the story. I do regard the label of being easy to read as complimentary and enjoy it when I hear people say that of my work. I think it helps excuse the wordiness, which, if done right, should go unnoticed during the actual reading of the piece. It's necessary but not cumbersome and should never earn the epithet of wordy.
And on that note, I sure the hell better stop writing.
posted by Rick Ollerman at 11:46 PM
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