Spare to Baroque Writing

Do you prefer spare or baroque type novels?

My friend prefers Elmore Leonard’s spare and terse prose, and it doesn’t bother him that Leonard has a less-than-tight plot that meanders. He likes the way Leonard’s writing is invisible to him, giving him the experience of living with the characters.

On the other hand, a novelist like Ken Follett, in his Pillars of the Earth, seems very baroque to my friend, with descriptions that pull him out of the story. Reading Follett, my friend wanted to edit like crazy.

I’ve also been thinking about the differences fiction genres. Christian fiction’s aesthetics of personalizing doctrine with a bare-bones story is very different from the commercial fiction’s aesthetics of entertaining a reader with a fast-paced plot and likeable characters, which is different from literary fiction’s devotion to language first and foremost, sometimes to the detriment of anything else.

Unfortunately, what we like to read doesn’t always match up with what we are able to write well. We write what we can write and are surprised by what appears on the page. Our reading can influence our writing, but I’m not sure it can dictate the form it will take. In the end, we choose what we read, and accept what we write.

Related posts:

1. Thinking equals writing
2. Career in Writing
3. 4 Habits That Help Your Writing
4. 5 Writing Tasks for Off Days
5. Writing Goals

Revise with confidence.