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Comment by Dirlewanger | Hacker News Reader

Nice read. I like how he doesn't wax philosophical about knowing if one is talented or not. If one can't take enough queues from the real world, then they most likely are delusional.

For the HN audience, #4 is the most relevant one. Too many things I read here have high school-level writing. The authors cared more about getting their half-baked opinion out on their Medium blog over proofreading (excluding ESLs). One of the best lessons from college is when one of my history professors metaphorically tore me a new asshole for not knowing how to write on one essay, and out of pity, gave me a grace period to fix it. He highlighted enough of my superfluous fluff that I finally got writing and how one must write as little as possible. I had other writing-intensive classes after that one and never had such an event happen again.

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>He highlighted enough of my superfluous fluff that I finally got writing and how one must write as little as possible.

Right, because Joyce, Pynchon, and Nabokov would have benefited from being told to write "as little as possible".

If you're writing non-fiction, maybe. If you're writing literature, to hell with rules. How impoverished our culture would be if all writing held itself to the same standard.

When you're trying to build a richly detailed world in your readers' minds, "as little as possible" might still be quite a lot of writing. But even such a detailed piece of work can suffer from superflous words and pointlessly convoluted grammar. Every letter of a finely crafted piece of writing should contribute to the intended effect.

This is one of the problems I've had back in my teens when I was reading fiction. Especially authors of fantasy or science fiction novels seemed to be very keen to describe their worlds in the most intricate details possible. And as a result they became very strenuous to read to the point where I simply stopped reading them at all. I think (and this is entirely subjective) that if you need to describe your fictional world in such perfect detail then maybe a book is simply the wrong medium. Then you should maybe opt for drawing a comic, where you can put all the power of your imagination into actual pictures.

I don't know. I read a lot of amazon books from newish authors.

I have had to put more than a few books down because the author was putting a lot of words down, but not really saying anything.

I think the content/word-count ratio is important.

my critique of new authors is more along the lines of how blatant they in their characterizations. I don't think I've ever read a book and thought "this person is just too long winded".

Well, that's not true. Jules Verne.... I could never finish 20,000 Leagues under the Sea despite being immensely interested in the story as a youngster.

He actually seems to cover this point in "know the market." If your market is high literature, then the words that would be extraneous in a newspaper aren't extraneous there.

>Right, because Joyce, Pynchon, and Nabokov would have benefited from being told to write "as little as possible".

They might have. Especially Pynchon, but Joyce too.

In fact, if Joyce had written nothing at all, that might not have been a bad thing.

I was afflicted with having to read "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" in high school. In it, Joyce puts forth his theory of art - that to be pure art, it should cause no response whatsoever in the viewer. Joyce is a great writer, and was able to achieve the effect he wanted - to write a book that produces no response whatsoever in the reader (other than the feeling of revulsion at being forced to waste my time reading it). But because his theory of art is rubbish, he wastes his talent producing "art" that is a complete waste, both of his talent and of the reader's time.

Stephen's theories aren't Joyce's theories, and the style in which Joyce writes is never Joyce's voice, in the sense that writers today are always prattling on about 'finding their voice' (the styles of Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, and the Wake accomplish very different things).

The tragedy of Portrait is that so many people read it as if it were simple autobiography. It isn't. Stephen is based on the young Joyce, yes, and in the original draft and notes (mostly destroyed, published as Stephen Hero) there's a saccharine sincerity that fits your sense of the book a little better.

But that's not the finished Portrait. In Portrait Joyce makes fun of himself. He's critical of his youthful exuberance. It's a hilarious book for anyone who's ever taken themselves too seriously, which, I think, is all of us.

Would you be able to quote a passage from the book where Joyce claims that that's his view? It's been a long time since I read Portrait of the Artist, but I don't recall that being in the book, nor does it sound like something Joyce would say.

At any rate, even if that really was the goal he set for himself, he failed. Ulysses elicited a wide range of responses from me.

Would I be able to quote it? No. It's in a conversation between Stephen and his friend as they walk around Dublin, and the book describes exactly which streets they walk down and where they turn and whose yard they pass while they're having the conversation. I remember one specific snippet: Stephen asks if lightning strikes a block of wood (stump, maybe?) and blasts it into a specific shape (a cow, maybe?), is that art?

I mean, there was a scene or two in Portrait that I responded to, too. But mainly, it was a protagonist I didn't care about, doing things I didn't care about, with other people I didn't care about, in places I didn't care about. So "no response whatsoever" is a pretty fair summary of my reaction.

I agree that deciding what's superfluous fluff and what's not is entirely subjective and that it should be an artist's freedom to decide how he expresses himself. However King's advice was written in the context of how to write successfully and I have little doubt that the average reader prefers brief rather than quaint wording that drives the story forward.

"As simple as possible as possible, but no simpler than that." - Albert Einstein

"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" - Exupery

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." - Emerson

"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire

Witty sayings are not meant to prove anything. They are meant to quickly make a point. Especially if the one who uses them is not as eloquent as the one who wrote them.

*cues

> You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later.

Yes, but don't forget to get back to that "correct it later" step...

Clearly didn't proofread enough...

No, queues. You gotta wait in line just like everyone else.

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