Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
The same goes for authors who have become big enough to get away with ignoring editors.
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Two examples come to mind:
Anne Rice's famous Amazon rant which mentions (somewhere in the great wall of text) that no editor will ever touch a word she has written ever again ... funny, a lot of readers don't seem to be touching them, either.
Tom Clancy.
Executive Orders. That cement mixer. Nuff said?
This purported novel reminds me of some websites I've seen which appear to be designed, not to sell the company's products, but to show off all the cool coding tricks the designer knows.* A novel is supposed to tell a story; if someone wanted a biographical encyclopedia of Civil War figures, they wouldn't be buying a novel. Novice hard-SF writers fall prey to the same thing: they explain the technology to death, and by the time some plot happens, the reader has lost interest.
Writing, like any art, is as much about what to leave out as it is about what to put in.
*Usually they're designed by consultants and are selling exactly what they were designed to sell: websites. This is great if you're the consultant, but it sucks if you're the client who paid him to design a website to sell your products.