I'm not a Stephen King fan. Horror and terror are not my idea of entertaining reading. But I was told that I really should read his half-autobiography, half-instruction manual, On Writing. Which I did – in pretty much one sitting.
King is a fantastic writer – mainly because he (mostly) follows his own rules for writers: keep the language simple and just tell the story.
As far as King is concerned, adverbs should be banned, and there is no need to pile up huge lists of adjectives to describe people and things.
So my advice to Stephen King might be to avoid the words of Stephen Fry – which are so flowery and over-decorated that they could seriously shock the king of horror.
The ubiquitous Fry has been retelling the legends of ancient Greece with his books Mythos and Heroes... and now Troy, which I was kindly given a copy of as an audiobook.
It's rollicking stuff, but Fry is not keen to use one word where ten will do. It's great that he may be introducing a new generation to the joys of the Greek myths, but let's hope his verbosity doesn't put some of them off.
Now he's done Troy, one suspects The Odyssey will be next in his sights – not a story that needs much in the way of hyperbole, although I suspect that wouldn't stop Fry going over the top once more.
The Troy audiobook is 11 hours long... I reckon Stephen King could get it down to around 100 minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment