I Love Nick Hornby

More from the Polysyllabic Spree:

"Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress. [...] You can't read a review of, say, a Coetzee book without coming across the word "spare," used invariably with approval; I just Googled "J.M. Coetzee + spare" and got 907 hits, almost all of them different. "Coetzee's spare but multi-layered language," "detached in tone and spare in style," "spare, exquisite sentances" [...] Get it? Spare is good.

Coetzee, of course, is a great novelist, so I don't think it's snarky to point out that he's not the funniest writer in the world. Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first things to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process that I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words—entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that?"