Quote:
Originally Posted by derangedhermit
JKR has Tom Clancy disease. Tom Clancy disease is when you are so popular you think (and in fact you can, to the detriment of the book) blow off your editor, or pick a weak one.
Main telltale symptom: books proceed from breakthrough novel and sequel of normal page count. Further additions to the series and other new books get progressively longer, when a good editor would have cut out all the fat and kept the story tight and moving. I dropped out of both JKR and Clancy around book 4 or 5. Compare against the LOTR trilogy: a six-part work in three books, each of approximately equal length.
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Compared to Clancy, JKR is Ernest Hemingway. Not that she wouldn't have benefited from a heavier editorial hand, perhaps. But it's really hard to argue with success. And, on that note, LOTR could have used some heavy editing in places, too. Not to make it shorter, particularly, but JRRT is pretty inconsistent as a writer: he deals with fight scenes very well (Moria; Minas Tirith) - the pacing is great, the descriptions clear, the tension high - and he can maintain this for dozens of pages. Some of his non-fighting writing is also quite good - the Birthday party, Rivendell, the Scourging of the Shire. But a lot of his writing isn't tight; it's unfocused and would have benefited from an editor to bring things into focus and tighten them up. (Although at the time he wrote this, I wonder whether any editor would have been able to do that properly - it wasn't like there was anything else out there to use for a comparison).