In Dreams... well, I was slightly overcompensating with that. I was a bit like a director for hire, so maybe I was putting too much imagery that was familiar to me into it.
So I went way too in depth? I thought they wanted the hole by hole.
Ask him what time it is and he'll tell you how the watch was made.
In painting feathers, you want to create the look of feathers, but if you try to paint all the feathers, you have nothing but disaster.
When my kid was five and playing with my camcorder. I don't like it. It makes it look fake looking, too much HD. I don't need to see your pores on TV, like why do I see your pores right here? That's not cool.
I probably complicate things unnecessarily now just to give the illusion of professionalism.
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
The wages of pedantry is pain.
There is, admittedly, a trend in popular history toward long books that bombard the reader with a fusillade of detail in the mistaken belief that accuracy is proportional to volume.
Pedantry is paraded knowledge.
The Victorians, they were like the Germans in World War II. They could not stop recording details about their lives and their age.
With all due respect to lawyers, it's wonderful that you have this intricate knowledge. You break down words to the nth degree. And sometimes I find it rather disgusting. And it goes on and on.
If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing - there may just be too much of it.
I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.
You have to avoid what I call the 'smartest boy in class syndrome,' which is, just because you know it, you don't have to tell it. I often will go through a manuscript crossing stuff out, and say, 'This is just too much,' you know?
He has the common feeling of his profession. He enjoys a statement twice as much if it appears in fine print, and anything that turns up in a footnote... takes on the character of divine revelation.
How many writers are there... who, breaking up their subject into details, destroy its life, and defraud us of the whole by their anxiety about the parts.
I think the tendency to over-explain and over describe is one of the most common failings in fantasy. It's an unfortunate piece of Tolkien's legacy. Don't get me wrong, Tolkien was a great worldbuilder, but he got a little caught up describing his world at times, at the expense of the overall story.
Who cares how many miles per hour the ball traveled once it left the bat, or how high the ball traveled in degrees, or how many seconds it took to leave the ballpark?
Personally, I'm not very keen on the visualization of absolutely everything.
Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
Sometimes, I tell them more than they wanted to know.
Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
I don't like the info-dump, as it's known.
World-building numbs the reader's ability to fulfill their part of the bargain because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. Above all, world-building is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there.
