4 ms·
how to be a novelist: use 10^n words when 10^(n-1) will do.
by gosub100 9mo ago
how to be a novelist: use 10^n words when 10^(n-1) will do.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago"yes, I would my steak well done and macerated into an easily digestible paste with no seasoning". There's more to good prose than just conveying the bare nutrients, y'know?
- floren 9mo agoMaybe he could have just replaced that whole section with a couple graphs showing average rainfall and crop yield for the Salinas Valley.
- eks391 9mo agoAhh but don't you know? A picture is worth a thousand words, so your charts would be upping the measures word count, not reducing it by an order of magnitude
- calepayson 9mo agoI think there are authors where this definitely applies and I don’t think Steinbeck is one of them. It feels analogous to complaining about how Michelangelo painted the Sistine chapel on the ceiling instead of on a canvas where we wouldn’t have to crane our necks to see it.
- floatrock 9mo agoHere ya go with literally an order of magnitude fewer words: > The Salinas Valley cycles through wet and dry decades. Droughts cause ruin and exodus, yet people always forget the previous climate phase. I dunno, doesn't seem to have the same impact on me. Maybe there is something to that whole prose thing.