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> The narrative action struck her as intolerably slow. > She had, she concluded, “changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and v
by hrktb 8y ago
> The narrative action struck her as intolerably slow.
> She had, she concluded, “changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels
Here she lays the blame solely on her, but I would think that it's also a writer's skill to hook the reader.
It takes two to tango, and if she felt the narrative was so slow she started to skim the sentences and ended up missing the deeper parts, perhaps the book could have used some trimming, better pacing, or a different approach to present the subject.
I feel that while we tend to read faster in general, we also read a lot more volume than the previous generations and I genuinely think we are pretty optimised to understand a lot very fast.
There is a ton of last century news articles or magazines that are unbearably slow and very diluted. Sometimes there will be deeper thoughts buried there, but 98% of the times it's not, which is depressing.
Even nowadays, there is a cute TLDR bot on reddit, and from times to times reading the original article really doesn't bring anything more than what the bot put in a more succinct way.
- jandrese 8y agoEditors have gotten indulgent IMHO, especially if the author is famous. For example, I'm sure George R. R. Martin is really interested in medieval royal feasts, but readers tend to get bored with yet another page filled with food items after the 20th time.
- emodendroket 8y agoHow much 19th-Century writing have you read, man?
- jandrese 8y agoI was more comparing to early 20th century works. There seemed to be a period where pages were expensive and authors more often felt the need to get to the point. Novels were considered long if they were more than an inch thick. The Lord of the Rings was considered epic length (it is dwarfed by a Song of Ice and Fire, especially if you count the unfinished works). When you pick up a copy of Fahrenheit 451 one thing you notice is how thin it is. To Kill a Mockingbird is another example. There are plenty of others. Now I wonder if that wasn't an indirect response to ponderous tomes like Moby Dick and War and Peace? Maybe the authors who grew up with those books realized that brevity was a virtue and learned to tamp back their natural urges to digress into long rambling and ultimately pointless interludes?
- emodendroket 8y agoIf we take so few examples, we can easily make the opposite argument. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Bartleby the Scrivener are quite a bit shorter than Gravity's Rainbow or For Whom the Bell Tolls. War and Peace and Moby Dick are both exceptionally compelling, by the way, and the latter was actually much more appreciated in the early 20th Century than when it was written.
- jandrese 8y agoYou were seriously invested with all of those pages on the whaling practices of the 18th century?
- emodendroket 8y agoYou bet your ass I was, but you mean the 19th Century
- emodendroket 8y agoI don't think the world needs to consist solely of page-turning books that "hook the reader."
- gmueckl 8y agoI'd say that in order to stay with a book, it needs a hook that the reader can grab on to. But readers have different tastes, so while you might enjoy slow moving brooding works (just guessing), someone else enjoys some fast paced, packed, dense writing. But in either case, if the book fails to meet expectations, chances are that you'll put it aside before you finish.
- emodendroket 8y agoI want something different from an Abe Kobo novel than I do from an Agatha Christie one.
- hrktb 8y agoAnything written needs to be interesting though. There is no way to escape the time spent / return on investment balance. The return can be entertainment, practical info on a legal subject, or thought provoking opinions on a message board. But the worst the text is written, the higher the return needs to be for the reader to continue reading.
- emodendroket 8y agoSo, for instance, if you're writing an avant-garde novel, the point may be to alienate the reader. That's not really "hooking" them in the traditional sense.