100 Pages of Drivel

I don't understand why some authors feel the need to let their mastery of the English language get in the way of a good story. A book that should be 400 pages stretches to 500. Heh...

This dude David Wroblewski is doing it. I'm reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. It's a really great story. It's a terrible book. You wrote a book. Good for you. Please don't bog down your story with a ton of crap that really doesn't have much to do with the story.

Why don't I quit reading the book? The story. And the author knows it. Maybe that's why I'm so annoyed.

There was an interesting thought raised in a section I read tonight. Edgar is talking to an old farmer (actually he's a figment of Edgar's imagination, but he's really there, but not really there. It's hard to explain.) and the old farmer is talking about the curse of being good at something you don't care about. In the old farmer's case, he's a great farmer, but he doesn't care about it. He says it's rare to find a man that cares about something he is good at doing. The old farmer says that when you see that in a person, you can't miss it.

It's one of those thoughts that's always been in a file cabinet toward the back of my brain. I've never been able to sum it up quite like that.

The 100 pages of drivel was worth it.