Well
I've finished London Fields, and although it does get a lot better
towards the end, the 150 pages in the middle that I had to skimread were
interminable. There are some really interesting ideas in it, but the
book is packed with so much drivel and pointless philosophising that
anything good is drowned in a swamp of cleverness. Nearly every guide to
writing focuses on getting rid of anything that you don't need, and
I've find that this has been about the best advice I've had. Every time I
write something I spend a lot of time going through it and taking out
as many words as I can, and the piece always reads better for it. I
guess this is most pertinent to short stories, and with novels there is
more leeway for tangental writing, but the bottom line is that
everything on the page should either move the action along or increase
the reader's understanding of a character, and there are thousands of
words in London Fields that do neither.
I've
looked the book up on Good Reads and lots of people on there rave about
it and praise it as Amis' best book, so maybe I'm wrong, or maybe I
just think Amis is a bit of a nobhead. Maybe reading London Fields will
end up being one of the most important things I do in developing myself
as a writer. I hope so, because I spent a lot of unenjoyable, slooow
time reading it.
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