Good post. It reminds me of some of the writing advice my first bosses gave me: BLUF (bottom line up front) and "tell your reader what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them when you end."
That's a great way to think of it. I used to lament how much redundancy there is in a lot of writing, but the older I get, the more I understand why it's there 😅
Interesting Times is probably my least favorite Discworld book. IT (and the Rincewind books generally) always struck me as Pratchett doing it for the lulz rather than doing what he did best, which is be spectacularly angry about something and find a way to make it into a funny story.
For me, whether I'll stick around through the muddy details boils down to whether I've been given a reason to care. A lot of Twitter threads do this admirably, starting with something like "X is such a difficult problem to solve because of Y, and here's the way Y works". Good sprawling novels tend to do that with compelling characters. The through-line of LOTR is very much the hobbits. I kept going through War and Peace because of Pierre and Andre. No matter how well-plotted the story is or excellent and observed the world-building is, without a character I care about being affected by the scene I don't sustain interest for long. (Twoflower is just not a compelling character.)
I really need to give War and Peace a shot, just go know what folks are talking about, I think. Entirely agree about the need for a character everything will impact... I think that's why I didn't really like Witch King by Martha Wells, even though Murderbot was excellent. It just never felt like anything really mattered.
Good post. It reminds me of some of the writing advice my first bosses gave me: BLUF (bottom line up front) and "tell your reader what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them when you end."
That's a great way to think of it. I used to lament how much redundancy there is in a lot of writing, but the older I get, the more I understand why it's there 😅
Interesting Times is probably my least favorite Discworld book. IT (and the Rincewind books generally) always struck me as Pratchett doing it for the lulz rather than doing what he did best, which is be spectacularly angry about something and find a way to make it into a funny story.
For me, whether I'll stick around through the muddy details boils down to whether I've been given a reason to care. A lot of Twitter threads do this admirably, starting with something like "X is such a difficult problem to solve because of Y, and here's the way Y works". Good sprawling novels tend to do that with compelling characters. The through-line of LOTR is very much the hobbits. I kept going through War and Peace because of Pierre and Andre. No matter how well-plotted the story is or excellent and observed the world-building is, without a character I care about being affected by the scene I don't sustain interest for long. (Twoflower is just not a compelling character.)
I really need to give War and Peace a shot, just go know what folks are talking about, I think. Entirely agree about the need for a character everything will impact... I think that's why I didn't really like Witch King by Martha Wells, even though Murderbot was excellent. It just never felt like anything really mattered.