Wednesday, November 12, 2014

In between the action scenes

Fred Clarke at Slacktivist has spent a decade dissecting the World's Worst Books - the Left Behind series.  I'd like him to speed up a little but I'm enjoying the critique.  In today's (probably Nov 12, I live on the other side of the world) post, he writes:
But anyway, we’ve finally reached the end of the Escape From the Jews subplot. That means we’re now just idling until the next big set piece begins. That’s the pattern in these books — a disconnected series of such set pieces, interspersed with long stretches of nothing in between. Jerry Jenkins usually fills that nothingness with airports, phone calls, prayer sessions and lots of unnatural conversation in which various characters, including Buck and Rayford, talk about how awesomely cool Buck and Rayford are.
Perhaps they need Elmore Leonard's advice:

I try to leave out the parts readers skip.
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Perhaps you need to work on describing the indescribable - and for inarticulate writers like myself, that is a huge slice of the peoples,places,things,events,actions pie.

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