In the Neal Stephenson thread, the talk has turned to the excessive length of some books. Sandikal says:
I wish more writers would be more concise. I’m weary of multi-volume epics and 700 page novels that have 300 pages worth of story. Sometimes, I think we’d be better off if writers would have to use pens and typewriters again so it wouldn’t be so easy to have these huge volumes.
As a matter of fact, Neal Stephenson always drafts in longhand and wrote the immense Baroque Cycle with a quill pen.
Now I think this is practically insane—but then I have practically forgotten how to write longhand. (I can in fact still do it. But it is no longer fluent and automatic. I probably can’t remember how to ride a bicycle either.) Nevertheless, it does demonstrate that when writing something long, word processors are not the problem when it comes to bloat. Not that anyone who has read Our Mutual Friend would suspect that it was.
This leads to the interesting question of what bloat is. It’s not equivalent to length. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is as long as anything Dickens ever wrote, and without a wasted word. Cyteen is that long too and A Fire Upon the Deep. (“That long” is being defined here as “more than two inches thick in trade paperback”.) It’s easy to think of other examples of long books that aren’t bloated. Come to that, you certainly could have a bloated short story.
PatrickG said:
you don’t feel the need to stretch a story longer than it need be
which I think hits the nail on the head. “longer than it need be” is a flexible length. It isn’t how many words. It’s how necessary the words are. “A 300 page story in 700 pages” is bloated. But who’s to say it’s a 300 page story? And what’s on the other four hunded pages? You can sum up any story in a paragraph, but reading that paragraph certainly doesn’t give the same satisfaction as reading the story.
I believe, as I said in my Stephenson post, that Stephenson’s words are all necessary for the story he’s telling. But the stories he’s telling are quite different from the plot summaries of his novels.
In the Re-reading long series thread I said:
In Diane Duane’s Door Into… books, when people are going to tell a story they begin, where we’d start “Once upon a time,” with the formula “This is the story of /whatever/ and this is the way I tell it.” I find it quite useful myself to think of that as the unwritten first line of any novel, because knowing what story it is and how I tell it is a very useful thing. The Iliad starts off with “Sing Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles” and the story you get is the wrath of Achilles, not the whole saga of the Trojan war—it begins ten years into the war, with the reasons for Achilles’s wrath, and ends when he stops being angry, with Troy still unfallen.
The problem, for me, with bloated books is that they’re not sure what story they are telling, so they throw in all sorts of things because they know them and they’re interesting. They illuminate minor characters, or they’re cool, or whatever. There’s a great temptation to keep on throwing in things like that, which leads to endless digressions and sometimes to losing track of what is important. That’s when it becomes bloat, in my opinion—when it loses track of the story it’s telling to make room for all of this other stuff. These days this is what the story tends to get lost in, not Hardy-esque descriptive passages.
However, there’s also a danger for readers complaining that something is bloated when it just isn’t doing what you want it to. H.D.F. Kitto complains about Shakespeare throwing in extraneous material in Antony and Cleopatra. He thinks the episode of Menas tempting Sextus Pompey doesn’t belong. But Kitto is wrong in this instance, because he imagines the story Shakespeare wanted to tell was the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra’s romance. In fact it’s the story of Octavian and Antony’s competing visions of how to be a Roman. In the love tragedy, Kitto’s right, Sextus Pompey doesn’t belong. But in the competing visions story Shakespeare (after Plutarch) was actually telling, the episode neatly illuminates Roman honour and what is acceptable. Octavian would have agreed and Antony wouldn’t, you think.
If you’re a writer and you’re worred about bloat in your own work, it’s as well to consider the saying that every scene ought to do three things. (C.J. Cherryh is rumoured to have cut out all the scenes in a novel that didn’t.) What the three things are varies with who’s telling you, but that doesn’t matter. If a scene is doing three things, any three things, you’re probably fine.
I don’t mind how long books are, but I do like books that, as Lewis Carroll put it, begin in the beginning, go on until they get to the end, and then stop.
Bloat is when a book goes longer than you can stand.
Cryptonomicon, no way that was too long. I could stun a mastiff with it in paperback, but I finished it gladly.
Baroque Cycle, about the second chapter of the first book.
Harry Potter, after the first book yeah we get it already shut up you rich stupid cow you don’t deserve it.
Neil Gaiman also writes in longhand.
He uses a fountain pen with a special-made-for-him nib.
In my personal blog, I went on a tirade about Peter Hamilton’s “Pandora’s Star”/”Judas Unchained” — 2000+ pages that make up a single novel. Some judicious editing would have made it maybe 1200, maybe 400. The first book has not a single conflict resolved (and a literal cliffhanger). A decent ending that managed to weave the huge cast together, but seriously, dude: Focus.
Bloat takes many forms. I feel that mid-period (pre-1999) Stephen King had taken on a lazy storytelling style, not just too big of a book: hyperbole and just plain stupid stuff that seemed to dare an editor to phone him up and say, “Stevie, baby — fourth grade gang bang? It just won’t play in Peoria.”
Part of the problem is a commercial one — namely, from accounts I’ve heard, publishers both in the U.S. and U.K. are actually encouraging longer, “door stopper” books because they sell better than shorter works apparently. The latest example I can recall is Daniel Abraham indicating that his publishers suggested his books in the new epic fantasy series he’s working on should be 500+ pages (or some large number like that) — bigger, in any case, than his Long Price Quartet novels.
In the U.K., some authors are finding books published individually in the U.S. being packaged into two-book omnibuses (I think, actually, that that’s happening with Daniel Abraham, again).
What this basically says to me is that your average consumer of genre literature seems to be swayed by the thickness of the book, as if a thick book is likelier to be a better deal than a slender one. So to some degree, I think the blame doesn’t lie with authors, but with consumers, with publishers, and probably (or perhaps especially?) retailers.
I think part of it is the price: here in North America, a big thick doorstop is the same price or a dollar or two more than its slimmer cousin, which makes the reader feel it’s a better value. At least that’s the theory.
“Bloat” definitely depends on the author. It’s more than just telling a 300 page story in 700 pages though. It’s also allowing a plot to evolve beyond your control. When that happens, what started out as a nice trilogy just keeps expanding.
Robert Jordan is an example of this–I LOVE the WoT series, but I would have been so much happier if he had kept the plot controlled, not gone on so many side trips, and finished the series in say, six books (and before he died).
Heroic Fantasy has particular trouble with this.
WoT is a fine example of this, as is the “Dance of Ice and Fire” series. I think it goes back to Tolkein, and how the fellowship of the Ring gets sundered and every little group has its own plot thread that traverses a different slice of Middle Earth.
But even Tolkein knew when to snip a few threads (Boromir doesn’t spend the last volume trying to make up for his mistakes, thank God). And I would have been perfectly happy to have had half as much of Pippin and Merry’s story as I got.
Although Tolkien did say his one regret was that his book wasn’t longer…I think editors get scared of telling well established authors to drop a part of their books.That’s my theory. Shouldn’t it be the editor who says when something is too long?
Just wanted to thank you for the writing hint. Make sure every scene does three things. What things? Work on it. Gave me a great chuckle, because it’s so right!
Orchard: I don’t know. I think editing must be terribly hard.
I mean part of Kitto’s point in his A&C example is how Shakespeare doesn’t keep to the rules of Aristotelean drama. But imagine if Shakespeare had an editor who kept telling him to keep is short and to the point. How can you be sure what someone else’s point is? I know there are great editors out there who can, it’s just a mystery to me how they do it. It’s more surprising that some of them get it right sometimes than that they don’t all do it every time.
Tudzak1: I don’t believe Ms Rowling was rich after the first book, and I don’t believe most people think bloat set in until the fourth or fifth. I’ve only read the first three so I don’t have an opinion — certainly the first three didn’t strike me as bloated. Also, could you be a little kinder about her? I don’t suppose she’s reading or she’d care if she was, but I think it’s pleasanter for everyone to keep discourse polite.
While I do think some bloat is caused by advances in technology (quill to fountain pen to typewriter to electric typewriter to word processor) — some books prove that any technology can be used to writer a long book.
The biggest problem with bloat in my opinion is the proliferation of infinitylogies.
I’m thinking here of series like the Incarnations of Immortality series by P. Anthony. Entire pages from it seem to have been cut and pasted from previously written books in the series and, really, the whole thing could have been edited down by a few books. And I’m not going to comment on all the Tolkien wannabees who publish underwhelming fantasy trilogies. And let’s not go into some comic book and manga series.
I read all 7 Harry Potter books to my daughter, several more than once, and she was pretty sanguine about the quality: beach books for bedtime. They were filled with unnecessary exposition that did not correct a newcomer’s ignorance and tried a returnee’s patience. The few sparks of creativity and wit are few and far between, but they are quite good. Simply not worth the work to find them.
Saving grace for the entire franchise, was the movie “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”
Oh my gosh! I got quoted in a blog post! I don’t know if I should be flattered or offended. ;)
I think it’s pretty easy to tell bloat from a good, long story. A book like “Fire Upon the Deep” is long, but the story keeps pulling you along and all of it is essential. I don’t think that story could have been told in 300 pages.
I went back to college after an 11 year hiatus and got a BA in English Lit. My last semester, I needed 18 units to graduate and was only able to work in classes worth 15. So, I set up an independent study project that involved reading and reviewing 11 books that had been #1 on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list for more than 10 weeks in the past 10 years. (This was in 1993.) It was pretty interesting because I was reading books that I normally wouldn’t have read. I read classics for my degree (and sometimes because I wanted to) and I read science fiction for fun. That’s my bloated background.
Anyhow, in doing this project, I encountered a couple of books that I would say were bloated. “The Prince of Tides” has a huge scene where the protagonist is having dinner with his sister’s psychiatrist and the author goes on and on and on about what they are eating. In “Red Storm Rising”, Tom Clancy lost me with the endless descriptions of military bases and ships and weaponry. Conroy and Clancy were the first writers that got me thinking that word processors might not be a good thing. ;) In contrast, “The Name of the Rose” was a long book that was just right. Every bit of it was necessary for the story. I thought the same applied to, of all things, “The Mammoth Hunters.”
I’ve been pretty picky about the books I read lately. I can’t say that I’ve picked up anything extremely bloated this year. However, I will say that I do think that bloat is in the eye of the beholder. There are plenty of people out there that like lengthy exposition. I’m just not one of them.
May I just add that I love the word “infinitylogies” and I think I’m going to steal it?
Bluejo: you’re right, I hadn’t thought of it that way.The first book I illustrated was by a well known writer who had appeared on Oprah etc. and I felt the editor working on the picture book were too hands off in regards to his writing.I was trying to suggest a possible cause and this sprung to mind.
I remember reading an article somewhere about Dickens padding his work to fit into serialized bits. Perhaps that happens in fantasy series.
Why thank you for the reference, Jo!
I think a great example of bloat is to compare the horrible transformation that fantasy journeys have undertaken in thirty years.
Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun does something that I ostensibly hate: The whole series is basically a journey. And yet compare and contrast with the innumerable journeys that crop up in Tad Williams, the two Terries (Goodkind and Brooks),Hamilton, Jordan, Eddings etc.
What changes Severian goes through, how our perspective as a reader – an observer – of this fascinating world changes, and grows!
Though I’m illustrating with journeys, I believe this holds true of any bloat: It occurs when the author neglects the interior journeys (or changes) of their characters, or their readers. You are left thinking, I’ve come all this way, either literally or metaphorically, but nothing’s changed!
Even the most entrenched of genre writers can surmount this, if they care to. Look at Chandler or Brust – the most hardbitten ostensibly stereotypical voices of Vlad and Philip Marlowe emerge from each adventure differently, sometimes only a little, but we as a reader may be forced to question the way we have viewed their entire worlds, whether it be a eucalypt-thronged LA, or Drageara.
I guess I’m a litte Hegelian or something about this stuff, but isn’t that what great books – great art – is about in one way or another? Change? If you’re going to neglect that, than don’t insult me by prolonging the agony to 1000+ pages…
How much of this is the trend to have series vs single books? It seems one thing if an author has conceived of a story that legitimately needs to span volumes. But are there incentives to long series that bias publishers and authors to extend over multiple books stories that really should be told in fewer volumes?
To be clear, I’m specifically thinking about series where either the single story spans multiple volumes or where they are a sequential set of adventures. Books set in the same universe either with the same characters or with different ones are a bit different in my mind.
Peter F. Hamilton is a bit of a poster child for this, certainly. I have the Dreaming Void at the moment, and losing the first hundred or so pages wouldn’t matter at all, really.
Or, long and very ordinary is far worse than short and very ordinary.
I like reading. Specifically, I like the experience of reading, as I’m going along. The point of it, for me, is to read; it isn’t to have finished books. (In fact, I hate finishing books. With many, I just fall off the end and get comedown; Stephenson isn’t very much like that, because there are so many launchpoints for other things throughout it.)
So I like long books, because I get so much more reading experience per book. (Assuming they’re reasonably dense, but that’s generally down to who the author is.) All in all, I’d far rather see an interesting story, with interesting people, in an interesting world, told over 500+ pages than in 120. It seems easier, all other things being equal, to make an interesting long book than an interesting short book, but just because something is easier doesn’t mean it is necessarily less good.
Long dense books do require more skill on the reader’s part than short spare ones – we need to be able to keep enough details in mind from N-pages-ago to follow what’s going on now, and that gets rather harder as N increases.
I think Neal Stephenson puts 3000 pages worth of story in 700 pages…
These days I rarely get through a novel that is longer than 300 pages – I prefer something, anything that I can get through in a week, so 150-250 pages is optimal.
That said, I do think that bloat can be in the eyes of the beholder. I got through Salem’s Lot in about 48 hours, and couldn’t put it down, and it went by all to quickly. Heart of Darkness, while a mere 90 odd pages, felt infinitely longer than that, and even if it had been edited down to sixty or fifty pages, would have felt long and tedious.
Eithin — wow, that’s an interesting comment.
I like reading too, and I also hate finishing books. (I’m still missing Anathem.) But even more I hate being bored when reading and thinking “Oh, get on with it for goodness sake.” I gave the example of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend above. It’s a book that would be better with half as many people and plot threads. It’s padded. It’s extraneous. As long as I’m enjoying reading, nothing is too long. But I do have to be enjoying it, and when I’m not, that’s bloat.
The most egregious examples of bloat in the form of a series I’ve ever endured:
L. Ron Hubbard’s ‘Mission Earth’
La Haye and Jenkins ‘Left Behind’
Couldn’t make it to the end of either (I know, many of you will say I should never have started).
The most recent example of bloat I remember reading was in one of the free Tor ebooks, “The Outstretched Shadow”. The protagonist, Kellen, has many doubts about himself and his abilities, what isn’t bad per se, quite the opposite, it’s one of aspects of his personality that makes him a very interesting character. But sometimes the authors overdo it, and you end up with page after page after page of internal monologues that feels like this:
“That magic she did, I cannot do it, it’s too much for me. But what if I could? No, I cannot. But, if I could? No, I definitely cannot. But, you see, she said I can. No, no, I can’t. Besides, she might be evil. But she’s so nice! She can’t be evil, can she? But what if she is? But she isn’t. But the unicorns don’t approach her, why don’t they? No, that cannot be, she’s good. But she could be tainted. Would then this be a trick to taunt me? No, she wouldn’t do that, besides, it’s a healing magic. Anyway, I cannot do that magic, it’s too much for me. But what if I could? No, I cannot. But, if I could? (…three pages later…) Whatever, I’ll try it and to hell with it! (…pyrotechnics description…) Oh, it worked! Who would have guessed!?”
Anyway, it speaks to the quality of the story as a whole that, despite this, Kellen’s the only character whose name I remember in all those ebooks, and that I’m going to purchase the next volume in the series the very day Tor’s web store is launched. :-)
The opposite effect happens in “Mistborn: The Final Empire”, where the story goes on in a very pleasant pace until near the end, when it seems the author got tired of the huge underground revolution he was developing through the whole book and hushed the conclusion in such an anticlimactic way you end up asking yourself why, if it was so easy, no one managed to depose the immortal evil lord in the previous 1000 years. It’s the kind of work you feel is 500 pages too short. I REALLY wanted to see that revolution/civil war unfolding the way the whole book hinted it would…
But as above, this is another series I’ll be buying the second volume as soon as it’s available in ebook format, so good it is. ;-)
A touch odd to like reading and hate finishing books. You could put a computer file on a loop in the middle I suppose. :)
Unless you are somewhere isolated/not wealthy Western country, or with limited supply, or no internet, you are pretty unlikely to ever run out of books!
Blue Tyson — I’m unlikely to run out of books. But I ran out of Anathem at the weekend. I can read it again…
Yep. Even if it is due back to the library, a fair chance they will let you take it out again. ;-)
The solution to the book-ending downer? Start a new book! (That’s why I read too much…)
I agree with you, Paxed. I never let more than a few hours pass between finishing one book and starting another. Heck, I sometimes start a new book before I’m done with the current one.
“Every scene does three things.”
I’m looking at what I wrote this afternoon, and maybe it does. I’ve a feeling it might be horribly-lumpish incluing, but it’s a character trying not to think about something else.
Sandikal, me too. In fact it’s pretty characteristic of me to start several books more or less at once and alternate between them. It’s usually easy to see then which one grabs me – which book have I dropped the others to push ahead on, which one am I reading when I accidentally stay up ’til midnight?
joelfinkle @@@@@#3: I loved “Pandora’s Star”/”Judas Unchained”, I read them in five days and I’d be hard pressed to remove even 50 pages.
Bloat is subjective, there are no bloated books, only books you like and books you don’t like.
Bluejo – Thank you! It might be worth thinking of bloat as something afflicting books, then, rather than a characteristic of books. Cancer, or possibly some sort of odd baroque climbing vine.
Or to turn the metaphor around, it needs a trip to the gym to convert the flab into muscle. Because I’d rather think of books as being naturally long and interesting, with odd outcrops and tangled parts, than being naturally short and compact.
Short books are just impractical. If it’s less than 120 pages, it won’t last me even an hour-long train trip; 300ish will get me there-and-back-again, but won’t account for delays very well. And the weight saving is wiped out by the need to carry a spare.
(Weight saving, he says… having been carrying Anathem on the London Underground for the last few days.)
Eithin: yes, Anathem was rather like a weight-lifting program. I’m sure it was terribly good for me, because I did lug it around everywhere.
I’m sure people write at their natural length. I know a writer whose natural tendency is to write seven book series. I tend to just naturally write books that are complete around 93,000 words — though I’ve just written a connected set of three. Ted Chiang seems to just naturally write novellas.
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was an avid reader of Asimov and Analog. Along the way, I encountered many short works (short stories thru novellas) which were later expanded into novels. Almost invariably, the briefer versions were stronger.
The best I’ve been able to figure, the short works were often built off one central strong idea. When those works were turned into novels, the plot was stretched out to book length through added details and further worldbuilding. Those details, which were unnecessary in the shorter form, diluted and distracted from that primary message which made the original so strong.
This wasn’t always the case. For example, the short story “Of Mist, Grass, and Sand” became the first chapter of DreamSnake. But I have stronger memories of how the novelization of “The Postman” reduced the terror of post-apocalyptic anarchy into yet another bad government to be overthrown by developing an organized survivalist society.
I’m going to jump in here with some entirely personal points of view, confining myself to sf and fantasy, though bloat is no respecter of genres.
Bloat is one of the reasons I’ve almost completely stopped buying dead tree books and only buy e-books now – I’ve no place left on my shelves for huge tomes and infinitylogies (love that!) that take up a cubic foot and many months of my life and that leave me no more entertained at the end.
Never got past volume 1 of WoT because it seemed re-hashed Tolkien like so many other fantasy series. Let’s get past the dragons and the magic swords and chosen ones, already!
In the SF genre the worst offenders are the Peter Hamilton series and the Kim Stanley Robinson series, but I think a lot of SF authors get that way after a point, probably after pressure from the publishers with selling targets.
For example, Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy is short, crisp and wonderful storytelling. But all the later add-ons and sequels and prequels with other authors just looked too much like milking a dead horse for all it’s worth, to mix metaphors savagely.
The Dune Series should have stopped after God Emperor, (Dune itself is the sf book I’ve re-read most – probably 10 or 15 times – and I enjoy it every time), but it’s one of the better ilogies. The prequels are interesting but started to bloat with the House whoever trilogy.
Stephen Baxter’s series with Arthur C Clarke – Time Odyssey was one of the better trilogies I’ve read recently. I suspect Clarke’s influence tempered Baxter’s tendency to get overwhelmingly abstruse in his physics (witness, his Manifold series).
The last ‘bloated’ ilogy that I read – and loved every word of it – was Tad Williams’ Otherland series. Serious doorstoppers and convoluted plotting if ever there was, but never a dull moment.
And then there’s the trilogy in four (or five) parts that continues to delight – Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Guess bloat is in the eye of the reader. As I get older I enjoy shorter works more.
Entirely btw, this is one of the most civilized discussions I’ve seen on the net – most quickly degenerate into name-calling and snarky comments and inanities. I love the temperate and erudite style of the comments here.
Editing is about taking on board the author’s vision and sharpening it. This can often involve hacking off surprising numbers of words.
Bloat is a boring topic. Why not talk about small books that pack a huge punch?
I like that idea, Dotan. What about it, Jo? It sounds like a great topic.
Dotan, Sandikal — most of the ones I can think of are on my re-read list to talk about individually.
I’ve talked about a number of them already.
I’d like to mention three book series that are excessively long, but which I don’t think are exactly bloated.
Song of Ice and Fire: Altho GRRM had to literally divide the most recent book in half, I still find these books fast and interesting reads. Maybe because each book is a bit like 8 shorter novels in one big book? The series has so many interesting characters that you don’t begrudge GRRM for wanting to tell us about each one. Not to mention the fascinating world it all takes place in.
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn: maybe a little bit bloated, but for a trilogy of doorstoppers (with the final volume split in half)it had a fascinating and fast-paced story with lots of characters that you become interested in, each of which gets to do something interesting.
Illuminatus! Trilogy: To steal a phrase from another commentator, this was an 2000-page story in about 800 pages. Or to look at it another way, it’s made up entirely of bloat–digressions, characters that have nothing to do with the plot (Nkrumah Fubar, the squirrel, August Personage), and subplots that are only tangentially related to the main “plot.” Of course, it’s almost all necessary, because the point isn’t where the plot ends up but the weird meanderings it takes to get there
Jo: I don’t know that Stephenson writing in longhand proves that word processors are not to blame for bloat. A one-author sample is just anecdotal evidence. Would Stephenson be more bloaty if he used a word processor? Guess we’ll never know.
I think, as an old fart, that word processors don’t necessarily lead to bloat so much as vapidity, more of a sense that something is finished before it actually is, because, hey, there it is on the screen, and I can put it in a pretty font, and I can edit it on the screen and believe I’m actually making substantive changes rather than just moving words around.
Which is just as anecdotal, but I do know I ask writing students not to bring their laptops to workshops, and a fair number of them report liking going back to longhand as a way to *slow* down and as a way to get back into the idea that what’s on the page is meant to be *rewritten* not just edited.
I still write longhand and while obviously everyone is different, if someone’s grown up writing on computers, changing it up and writing longhand might just be of use to them.
PS Hope to feature your latest on Amazon soon. I’ve enjoyed the series, just haven’t gotten around to talking about it.
Jeff: I did mention Dickens and George Eliot as well as Stephenson as examples of writing long without word processors.
I agree that writing long-hand slows you down. I think this is good for some people and bad for others — some need to go faster, others need to go slower.
I strongly disagree about it making it easier to rewrite. If I write a sentence longhand and I want to change it, there is is, stuck on the page. If I want to change it on the computer, there is is changed. The computer gives me the ability to rewrite, fix, get it right. I’m 43. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words longhand before people were kind enough to invent computers. I typed them up laboriously onto typewriters. (They were crap words, but that’s not the point. So were the next lot I did on the computer.) I can still remember that sensation of “it would be better to have said x than y but I can’t face retyping the whole page”. Longhand gave me “oh, that’ll do” sentences. The computer let me write sentences that were the way I wanted them.
On writing longhand / by typewriter / on a word processor: Clifford Stoll experimented in writing Silicon Snake Oil, alternating with different writing media every day. He said that the most interesting human anecdotes were written longhand; the clearest and most careful reasoning was typewritten; and the bulk of the book was first-drafted on the word processor.
I’ve written most of my stuff (most if not all of it still not quite publishable) in a word processor or text editor, but a few pieces in paper notebooks. With wide margins and double-spacing, I don’t think writing longhand discourages revision. Most of my paper drafts go through several scratchings-out and insertings and rearrangings (with arrows in the margin) on paper before I rewrite them in the text editor. Even if you’re writing closely spaced and don’t have room to revise on paper before transcribing to the word processor, you’re forced to consider rewriting as you transcribe. David Moles, I think, suggests printing out your first drafts, marking them up as you reread them, and then retyping them as you rewrite, instead of revising the first draft all on screen.
Something a text editor or word processor does allow you to do a bit more easily than paper is come up with half a dozen alternate wordings of an initially awkward sentence, and leave them there to come back and pick the best variation with fresh eyes.
Anyhow, in doing this project, I encountered a couple of books that I would say were bloated. [..] In “Red Storm Rising”, Tom Clancy lost me with the endless descriptions of military bases and ships and weaponry.
But the loving descriptions of how an Apache AH-64 launced a Hellfire missile to stop the lead T-72 tank coming through the Fulda Gap are the whole point of the book! That it doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean it’s bloated, it just means Clancy wasn’t telling a story you wanted to read.
Some writers work better with room to move, room to put e.g. gratitious scenes of how to eat Cap’n Crunch properly in. If you read for plot or story you’ll get annoyed with these books, but if you read for atmosphere or clever writing or just wanting to stay inside the author’s mind, you’ll love these.
A lot of the disccusion of bloat on sf/fantasy fora always ends up in a sort of nostalgic longing to an imagined golden age, where books were short and to the point, but i’ve read a metric buttload of those short novels in the past few years and so many are not short, but stunted. Bare bones plotting, sketchy, two-dimensional characters, endings that come way too soon undsoweiter. Even the best authors (Heinlein frex) suffered from this.
On longhand vs word processor (and bear in mind my contribution to the literary arts is to not contribute to them) I found that I hated writing longhand (something I had to do through early high school) much preferred the typewriter and loved word processing. My brain just works better with it — or so I like to think.
I found I tend to jot down ideas at random in one or two brief sentence and then heavily rely on the copy/paste function to put them in an order that I feel makes sense and strengthens the point I want to make, adding new text to bridge bridge between each idea.
When I took an English (non-fiction) writing class to complete my bachelors, my teacher couldn’t believe how bad the handwritten essay I handed in for the in-class “exam” was compared to the one I had written on my computer at home (and she wasn’t just talking about my near-illegible script).