*If it's a novel, keep it under 300 pages. Who wants to stay with a story for over 300 pages? This is why I can't read Russell Banks's "Affliction." How self-indulgent: To imagine the tale on your tongue requires so many stacks of paper!
My old teacher, Amy Bloom, tried to write "medicine-ball prose." Very few sentences, but each sentence contained a great deal of mass (a great deal of meaning). To those who insist on stretching out over 400, or 500, pages, I'd say: Why not take a lesson from Chekhov and simply abandon the First Act? Act Two becomes Act One. Simple!
Why can't I read Tana French's new novel? It's over 500 pages, and also, she's incapable of writing a sentence as clean as: "I was tired." Instead, it's always: "I was one-foot-in-the-grave tired, so tired I'd lost touch with reality, sleep-stunned, zombie state, can't-even-remember-my-name exhausted." Good grief. Who wants to read nonsense like that?
*If it's an essay collection, or a bundle of short stories, keep it under 200 pages. This is the Nora Ephron rule. Also, there's a distressing trend among publishers. Take a dead story writer, and ignore his wishes. Ignore the fact that he published eight collections, and each was 200 pages long, and each was carefully organized and packaged. No. Just gather ALL the stories, forty years of stories, and throw them into one brick-like tome. No more creative titles. Just: "The Collected Stories of XXX." A move guaranteed to drain the joy from reading. Guaranteed to make Eudora Welty, e.g., or Andre Dubus, seem less fun and less accessible to many, many new readers.
*Fictional characters don't need to be likable, but non-fiction subjects should be likable. I'm not sure why this is. The reason I can't enjoy the real-world tale about the Circleville Letter Writers is that I so strongly dislike each of the main players. There's no one for me to love. (Maybe podcasters could do a bit more research and find a way to sympathize with Mary or Karen.)
If a character has a passion, and takes great pains to achieve a difficult goal, then I'm with that character. I'll forgive almost anything, if I recognize a "spark" in the character. This is why I can read about Richard Nixon. But the Circleville Letter Writers? Ugh. I hope never to meet them again, via page or via podcast.
*Quiet is OK. Recently, Stephen King wrote about his distaste for the adjective "amazing." He said he never wants to see it again. (Actually, I'm pretty sure King is blurbed on the back of a Tana French novel, and I'm pretty sure the adjective he uses is "amazing.")
Amy Bloom chimed in. She said, more or less, "Quiet is OK." Not every moment requires prose fireworks. Simple can be good. I admire this quality in Sigrid Nunez's "The Friend"; the narrator rarely, if ever, makes a spectacle of her own grief, and the sense of restraint has a paradoxical effect. That restraint makes you believe that the grief is really there, and is really powerful--too powerful to be addressed head-on.
*If I don't laugh before the end of the second page, everyone is in trouble. Another reason I can't bring myself to read Russell Banks's "Affliction." Life has humor; fiction, too, should be funny. The blacker the humor, the better. In "The Friend," the narrator merrily identifies traits that make you a "suicide risk," then she giggles to herself as she realizes each and every trait is something that applies to her own life. That's the kind of humor I'm talking about. Sign me up. Please and thank you.
My old teacher, Amy Bloom, tried to write "medicine-ball prose." Very few sentences, but each sentence contained a great deal of mass (a great deal of meaning). To those who insist on stretching out over 400, or 500, pages, I'd say: Why not take a lesson from Chekhov and simply abandon the First Act? Act Two becomes Act One. Simple!
Why can't I read Tana French's new novel? It's over 500 pages, and also, she's incapable of writing a sentence as clean as: "I was tired." Instead, it's always: "I was one-foot-in-the-grave tired, so tired I'd lost touch with reality, sleep-stunned, zombie state, can't-even-remember-my-name exhausted." Good grief. Who wants to read nonsense like that?
*If it's an essay collection, or a bundle of short stories, keep it under 200 pages. This is the Nora Ephron rule. Also, there's a distressing trend among publishers. Take a dead story writer, and ignore his wishes. Ignore the fact that he published eight collections, and each was 200 pages long, and each was carefully organized and packaged. No. Just gather ALL the stories, forty years of stories, and throw them into one brick-like tome. No more creative titles. Just: "The Collected Stories of XXX." A move guaranteed to drain the joy from reading. Guaranteed to make Eudora Welty, e.g., or Andre Dubus, seem less fun and less accessible to many, many new readers.
*Fictional characters don't need to be likable, but non-fiction subjects should be likable. I'm not sure why this is. The reason I can't enjoy the real-world tale about the Circleville Letter Writers is that I so strongly dislike each of the main players. There's no one for me to love. (Maybe podcasters could do a bit more research and find a way to sympathize with Mary or Karen.)
If a character has a passion, and takes great pains to achieve a difficult goal, then I'm with that character. I'll forgive almost anything, if I recognize a "spark" in the character. This is why I can read about Richard Nixon. But the Circleville Letter Writers? Ugh. I hope never to meet them again, via page or via podcast.
*Quiet is OK. Recently, Stephen King wrote about his distaste for the adjective "amazing." He said he never wants to see it again. (Actually, I'm pretty sure King is blurbed on the back of a Tana French novel, and I'm pretty sure the adjective he uses is "amazing.")
Amy Bloom chimed in. She said, more or less, "Quiet is OK." Not every moment requires prose fireworks. Simple can be good. I admire this quality in Sigrid Nunez's "The Friend"; the narrator rarely, if ever, makes a spectacle of her own grief, and the sense of restraint has a paradoxical effect. That restraint makes you believe that the grief is really there, and is really powerful--too powerful to be addressed head-on.
*If I don't laugh before the end of the second page, everyone is in trouble. Another reason I can't bring myself to read Russell Banks's "Affliction." Life has humor; fiction, too, should be funny. The blacker the humor, the better. In "The Friend," the narrator merrily identifies traits that make you a "suicide risk," then she giggles to herself as she realizes each and every trait is something that applies to her own life. That's the kind of humor I'm talking about. Sign me up. Please and thank you.
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