Zack McMillin writes: The Hank Stuever riff sent me to the bookshelf for Nick Hornby's "The PolySyllabic Spree." I love it so much I'm going to retype it for Gangrey readers everywhere.
He's talking about novels and J.M. Coetzee in particular and how he got 907 hits when he googled "J.M. Coetzee and spare." His point is about fiction, but I think there's a parallel to what we do at newspapers, too. We're all trying to corral readers, right?
"Coetzee, of course, is a great novelist, so I don't think it's snarky to point out that he's not the funniest writer in the world. Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first things to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process that I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words -- entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound like manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty hour days) Go on, young writers -- treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! Have you ever looked at the size of books in an airport bookstall? The truth is that people like superfluity. (And, conversely, the writers' writers, the pruners and the winnowers, tend to have to live off critical approval rather than royalty checks.)"
He adds, later on, about Dickens:
"Could he have been cut? Absolutely he could have been cut. But there comes a point in the writing process when a novelist -- any novelist, even a great one -- has to accept that what he is doing is keeping one end of a book away from the other, filling up pages, in the hope that these pages will move, provoke and entertain a reader.
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