Love Your Words (but not too much)

Ziegler has a lot of great quotes in his book, The Writing Workshop Notebook, but this one made me laugh and at the same time it rings very true. I spend a lot of time on picking the right words. I spend even more time picking out names of characters and places.

Words have power. They set tone and image and put the reader into the world you are creating. My wife thinks I spend too much time worrying about such things, but the wrong word can be jarring or confusing to the reader, and may draw them out of the story, maybe for only a moment, but great writing is experienced, not just read. When done extraordinarily well, the author becomes invisible and the reader simply goes along for the ride.

Contrary-wise, when the wrong words are chosen, or when there are too many, the reader gets bogged down and can certainly tell there is a conductor at the front of the locomotive who is determined to drive the train off the tracks.

Writers can fall in love with certain passages, and sometimes it can be to the detriment of the story. Less is more may be a cliché, but it's usually true. We've all read stories that were clunky or overly wordy. It's actually one of my pet peeves. I get irritated when the author goes on and on about a particular subject or describes everything in sight in excruciating detail. The consequence is that I skip the passage. If the writer stubbornly continues I may put the book down altogether.

I actually did a blog post about Neal Stephenson's Reamde, Don't Reamde!, if you care to read it, because he is about the most verbose writer of our generation. He doesn't use an editor anymore, at least that is the rumor, and the book could be easily half the length and still tell the same story. I will never read another of his books because he loves his words too much.

Sometimes even when you love them you need to set them free!

Pimping a book: Lexicon by Max Barry

UK / Aus / NZ / SA

I just finished the audiobook version of Lexicon by Max Barry. It made my drive to Pennsylvania for the next residency in my MFA program a riveting adventure instead of drudgery.

I've been a Max Barry fan since he was Maxx Barry. I loved Jennifer Government, and I've made it a point to read every book he's written. Max's infectious, dark humor has always been a hallmark of his work, but the tone of Lexicon surprised me. It feels like an older, more mature brother of his other works. It's a blisteringly brilliant book. I was a fan before this novel came out but this new book puts Max into a different tier.

Be careful...reading Lexicon will compromise you, turning you into one of his proselytes for this heart-stopping thriller. It's a profoundly intelligent tale that covers a global conspiracy to use words as keys to unlock the human mind. 

The novel follows a young street hustler drafted into a secret organization, made into a weapon by careless inattention, and a seemingly innocent bystander, the only survivor of a horrific disaster. Usually his barb filled prose are more than enough for me but he goes for a different approach in this book. The normal tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek style is set aside for a more serious tone, elevating Max Barry into the upper echelons of science fiction writers. He has obviously done a lot of historical research to ratchet this story up several notches and combined with the philosophical undertones, it really messed with my head.  Barry jumps back and forth through the timestream, which serves to maintain a blistering pace and keeps you guessing who is one whose side and what's going to happen next.