Authors most in need of editing or abridgement

Wise_A said:
Dan-friggin'-Simmons. The Abominable was a pretty good book, despite being a massive disappointment. There's no way to explain it without ruining it.

Everything this guy writes follows the same thread: nothing happens for 450 pages, and then you get to find out if you were wasting your time. The length of the narrative presents a huge gamble.

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And sometimes, you lose:

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Look, you wanna cut about 200 pages out of Sleeping Beauties, go right ahead. Keep your hands off The Stand.
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Which version of the Stand - the original or the 'enhanced' version? The Stand was, by far, my favorite King novel, even with the glaring error of Harold using a Colt Woodsman in .38 caliber.

I have found errors in many of King's books. There are only two possible explanations, either he doesn't take time to research things or he makes them intentionally to see what reactions they create. I wouldn't rule out either explanation, or even a combination of the two.
 
I bothered to read the Hobbit....

Kiwi cop said:
I got one of the last Tom Clancy penned Jack Ryan books for Christmas a few years ago. I finished it at 01:00 am on December 26th.

Led Child verbose?. His writing style is short concise sentences with little to think about.

Took me three attempts to get through Lord of the Rings. I never bothered to read The Hobbit.

My biggest gripe with writers is unending use of commas. Some editors insist on "sets" of commas, two in a sentence, and seem never to have heard of the Oxford comma system. Write it like you would speak.
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I was advised to read the Hobbit. I did and never bothered to read the rest of the series. I have an unreasonable dislike of that form of fantasy.
 
I am a wordsmith by trade and have learned over the years that a good brief should be BRIEF and written on about the third grade level if you want the judges to read and understand your point.
Believe it or not what has helped my writing is posting on this forum. You have to keep your message short, pithy and attention grabbing.
Too bad I can't use emoji's in briefs. ( Can't use cuss words either :rolleyes:)
 
CAJUNLAWYER said:
I am a wordsmith by trade and have learned over the years that a good brief should be BRIEF and written on about the third grade level if you want the judges to read and understand your point.
Believe it or not what has helped my writing is posting on this forum. You have to keep your message short, pithy and attention grabbing.
Too bad I can't use emoji's in briefs. ( Can't use cuss words either :rolleyes:)
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Add the jurors to your above bolded and the initials K.I.S.S. come into play. Sort of Little Things Affect Little Minds!:)
 
Dean Koontz..........How many sentences to you need to write to decribe that it's morning.... Yeah Hi the sun's up....
 
"Madison", by Lynn Cheney - looks like someone threw a bunch of paragraphs at an editor who was on vacation. Some interesting stuff, poorly organized and lots of junk thrown in.
 
rwsmith said:
He never used more words when one would do.

I think one of the toughest reads I've had was 'A Tale of Two Cities'. One of the few times I've resorted to Cliff's Notes to keep it straight in my head.

When I was a kid I thought Melville could have left out all the stuff in Moby Dick that didn't have to do with whale hunting, but as I got older I appreciated all of his ruminations, even the entire chapter on why the whale was white.

Which Jack Reachers is the one where he went to his old command and found everything had changed, a woman is accused of something and they take off and end up infiltrating some secret fortress, kill all the guards and get to the bottom of the whole deal? I thought that one was way too wordy. They seemed to get into endless pratfalls, just to fill pages. I did like the parts where five or six guys thought that they 'had him'.:D

I don't mind long books, if they are only as long as they need to be. I don't like to waste time reading fluff.

My sister had a box set of four books called, "Reader's Digest Teen Age Treasury". Each volume was filled with the most fantastic true stories. From the Andrea Doria to a fighter pilot being marooned on an island trying to get out out of Korea when his plane was hit. At the end of each was a 'book section', where I learned about Buddy, the first seeing eye dog and "The Amazing Crusoes of Lonesome Lake. These books were in the fifties and just recently I've come across references, maybe on this forum, to the Lonesome Lake book.

It's said that Reader's Digest was made to be readable at a simple level, but the stories were well written and a fifth grade level back in the 50's was a tad higher than it is now. I wore out that box set, and a few months ago I found one on Ebay and got it. I'm 'reducing' my possessions and I've donated a lot of books to the library, but I'm going to keep that. They definitely helped along my love of reading.
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More writers should follow this Hemingway practice:
"I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of s---,
I try to put the s--- in the waste basket."
 
Clive Cussler

Cussler has long since ceased writing the Dirk Pitt books and the current publishing crew are ridiculously sloppy. My favorite sentence: "He ordered them to initiate the initiative."
 
One of the biggest problems with the Readers Digest condensed books was the selection of subjects. I read a few of them, and for the most part, if I hadn't been sick and bored out of my skull, I'd never have touched them. Despite several tries while ill, I never did get through "The Simarillion". Author stole shamelessly from the Nubeilungenlied anyway. I've never been able to read Robert Ludlum, the guy who took over for him and I've lost my taste for the guy who took over for Clancy.

I got two very good pieces of advice on report/memo writing while I was working. The first was my direct supervisor told me to write for an 8th grade level. The other was when my manager at the time gave me a book titled "How to get your point across in 30 seconds". That worked out to about 1 page. Did help in getting things done.

About convoluted writing. During a grad school law class I had to read Baker (or was it Adams?) vs California. About search and seizure. 55 pages of legal sleeze by 7 or the 9 members of SCOTUS. I read that thing 7 times before it dawned upon me that the bulk of it was "I hold with my learned brethern in assent/dissent, but they greviously err in their reasoning. The correct points of law are.........."
 
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Two of my favorite authors have been Robert C. Ruark and David Lindsey. I think Ruark was the sole American journalist who understood the reality of African politics and the grimness of Mau-Mau terrorism. The rest were mainly liberal apologists.

Both Ruark and Lindsey make the reader feel present in their scenes. You can almost see the characters and settings.

Now, if you want to read a man who really seems to be paid by the word, try Prof. John Norman's later books set on the fictional planet of Gor. I've never seen anyone else
so wordy and repetitious!

I've read a couple of other things by him, and he likes to type, or dictate! I'd like to see his Ph. D dissertation at Princeton. I bet it's wordy!

It is sort of fun to decipher which real ancient cities inspired those in his books. Was Ar based on Rome? Maybe on Athens? :confused:
 
susieqz said:
hermn melvil.
moby dick could be great novel if you chopped 100 pages out of it.
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I think it's a great novel as is. Wouldn't change a word. Of course I had the pleasure of reading it under the guidance of the professor who was acknowledged as the universal expert scholar on Melville.
 
Ian Fleming

I've read several of the James Bond books, and they're bad, not Willi Heinrich or Perry Rhodan bad, but bad.

His prose hits the floor like a lead ingot.
 
JULIETTE by Marquis de Sade takes the prize for long winded rambling in serious need of editing. The guy wrote it while he was locked up in the nut house and had absolutely nothing else to do for a few years. You don't have to get too far into to see why they kept the author locked up! That book could make Jeffrey Dahmer cringe.
 
Those of us born in the mid to late 20th century have discussions about which books are best or which books to read.

Those people born at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st ask: "What is a book?"

"You have much to learn, Grasshopper! And have not the ability to use all of the tools provided to obtain that knowledge."

I would like to tell you that the quote comes from some great sage but it doesn't.
 
I tend to follow authors. Some I like that put me in the scene. Others I want it as a friend says " Put it in crayon".
 
A book FULL of nothing.....

I hate to badmouth classics because apparently somebody likes them to put them on the 'best' lists. But in this case I'll make an exception.

The Sound And The Fury - tale of a somewhat complex and dysfunctional family over time when you never know what they are talking about, who is being talked about, WHEN whoever in the book is referring too and their actions are implied.

This was touted as being in the great vein of James Joyce and Virginia Wolf because it's so hard to comprehend. I believe that is it's only attribute. I can comprehend James Joyce pretty easily but it seems like Somerset Maugham wrote a book, and in order to make it 'profound' went back and made it as vague and confusing as possible to join the ranks of the great 'stream of consciousness' writers.

There were about two interesting pages for each of the main characters. So many words. So little to show for it.
 
Tom S. said:
Those three pale in comparison to his Tower (Gunslinger) collection. It's an 8 book collection (IIRC) that could have been done in far fewer volumes, and the longer it went on, the weirder and more verbose it became.
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The issue with King is that he really only has one story, which he has managed to tell in about 50 books and hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of words. Admittedly, he has fooled me into buying and reading all of them. The Dark Tower series really seals it, as nearly every book he has written is related to the Gunslinger's tale. And at the end of the Dark Tower story, we find out that it was all just a . . .
 
Hmmmm....

Rastoff said:
John Steinbeck. He never used one word when ten would suffice. Even so, he wrote what continues to be my all time favorite quote from a book:

"In marching, in mobs, in football games, and in war, outlines become vague; real things become unreal and a fog creeps over the mind. Tension and excitement, weariness, movement--all merge in one great gray dream, so that when it is over, it is hard to remember how it was when you killed men or ordered them to be killed. Then other people who were not there tell you what it was like and you say vaguely, "yes, I guess that's how it was."

― John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down
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I've only read a little Steinbeck, a few novels and short stories, but didn't see much of this in the ones I read. The Grapes of Wrath had me captivated all the way through. Tell me the title of the one you quoted so I can avoid it.:D:D:D
 
A high school English teacher said it best. "A book report should be like a woman's dress. Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting." I'm thinking the same thing goes for the book.
 
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Wow....

Marshwheeling said:
Verbosity can be a plague in a journalist or a lawyer, but I would be slow to criticize it in a novelist. Cormac McCarthy, for example, has been accused of overwriting, but consider this:


"They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."

What would you cut?
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Not a single word.

Side note: Surely everybody remembers 'Classic Comics'. They were cool.
 
I read big chunks of Kings thesis, published as Danse Macabre while waiting in a checkout line. It was about the theory and practice of myth composition, myth history and how to write good horror. Wish I'd bought it.

Some of his stuff is very good, but he could manage to trim some of the internal ruminations of his characters and detailed examination of what drives them. I guess that's the difference between literature and just plain books. If you're gonna be a Lit Prof, ya gotta write the genre.
 
Marshwheeling said:
Classics Illustrated. Without them, I wouldn't know a thing about Moby Dick, although I did go on to read Tale of Two Cities and The Count of Monte Christo in full.
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Their version of, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was good, and I think I read about Alexander the Great and Rob Roy in those comics.

Add, The Last of the Mohicans. But I read the whole book,too.
 
Having to read An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser, for a Jr. High English class, was pure torture. The prose is so dry and boring that the book should be illegal. "Classic", my Granny's old fiddle!

I tried reading Stephen King... once! I forget which book, but it was way too sophomoric for my tastes.
 
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