Reading over the Goodread
comments on Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies,
I somewhat ruined this book for myself.
Well, even if shortlisted for the Man Booker award, the first 50 or so pages
just rung my attention completely dry—so—it wasn’t just the Goodread comments with
spoiler alerts, informing me about the unsatisfactory ending and prompting me
to lay this book down before wasting anymore of my time reading another word (I admit I especially
searched for those comments to substantiate my own suspicions…), it was all the so
many words themselves…
I picked up this novel, which I’m sure is excellent by all other
accounts, in a thrift store in Herndon, VA. Appealing cover. Alluring book
jacket. Written by a novelist I’d never heard of before but listing accolades.
Flipping through and picking up new
vocab words like: kismat, ayah, ringeen, bhandari, seacunny, lascar, dhoti, khameez, puja and others...
That was probably the greatest appeal of this book: An
opening up of new worlds to me. These vocab words promised that.
But the story itself…meh. An artfully woven tale, with
interesting dilemmas, but nonetheless boring. Droll. Details ad nauseam. More
and more vocab terms like rotis, achar, nalki, datura, pishaches, hunemzad all piling up until they stuffed-up the flow of the
story for an audience member such as myself. Thick, blocky paragraphs one after
another.
Simply, too many words.
Awf, I despise such words coming out of my own fingertips. But dammit: Too many words!
Now, primary question put is: Is it possible for a novel to have too many words?
Prolixity may be
one of any writer’s cardinal sins and efficiency
and effectiveness of word use any one of a writer’s
greatest assets.
So what to watch out for as both a reader and a writer?
- Big, blocky paragraphs—one after another—is one.
- Filling the front part of your manuscript with too many cryptic terms most of your audience will not immediately understand (not everyone wants to flip back-and-forth from a glossary, even if you provide one, and not everyone picks up a novel to spend the majority of their time learning a new language)
- Over-description: I’ve been rejected before on having too much exposition in the beginning of my manuscript; not getting to the story fast enough. So, good rule-of-thumb: if it doesn’t move your plot along, delete it
- Lack of dialogue—leads to blocky-paragraph-syndrome
- Too much dialogue—do you want to read a novel or a play?
- Redundancies in sentence structure and diction:
- Such as the use of: Elizabeth went to the mahogany table, stopped—her hands lingering indecisively on its veneered surface; questions off who could possibly be on the other end cluttering through her mind. She turned away, turned back. Then, in a dash, she picked up the phone and put it to her ear and heard a voice whispering: “You are the one writing here…”
- Adjectives and adverbs and one or more action-sequences that can be combined or deleted, all serving to clutter up your sentence and your scene moreso than add tension or move the plot or lend any additional useful information to your reader
- Scenes that seem to lead nowhere. Ever been reading a story and the scene just goes off on a tangent, only to come back 30 pages later to the main plotline and you’re stuck wondering what that all that recall about a boating trip they once took to Cancun for? Yep. Unnecessary side-trails that just circle back to where you were before. Yawn!
Any more suggestions for what to watch out for as a reader and a
writer? Thanks for visiting! :D