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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1390998" data-attributes="member: 812">See, the fact that people have been fighting over this for a long time suggests (not to say makes clear) that this is not an issue of fact -- it is purely, simply and completely an issue of taste.Some people like terse writing. Some people like lavish writing. Some people like both.Some very few writers (that is, Steven Brust) can do both effortlessly, entertainingly and enthusiastically.But there is simply no objective reason to prefer either. If there were, the fight would have been over long ago. In story-telling, being able to "compress" information does not under ANY circumstances mean telling a necessarily better story.Take for example your average "shaggy-dog" story, where the narrator circles around and around and around, never really getting anywhere, just spinning things out, adding little virtuouso flourishes here and there, making parenthetical comments right, left, center and topwise as he goes along, as they occur to him, without rhyme or reason except as the dictates of his whimsy (interacting as it does with the random notions that pop up in his imagination) guide him, until finally, once he's starting to run out of coincidences to pile on top of coincidences, jokes to follow jokes, ad libs after ad libs, lists upon lists, and decides at last to bring the whole winding edifice to a somehow spontaneous yet irresistible conclusion.Is "compressing" such an edifice the same as "improving" it?My opinion on this is a resounding no. Great writing can be confusing. It can be redundant. It can be so overloaded with information that no one can draw out all its possibilities in one pass.Think of Eliot's achievements even in something as simple as "Prufrock". Or consider what Byron accomplishes in the sprawl that is "Don Juan". Read Dumas. Read Dickens.If you like, read Joyce, but don't say I didn't warn you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />It does no such thing. It only means that the good Professor would have liked to have spent more time writing the story and putting in more details. Given that the most common charge levelled against LotR is that it's TOO LONG, it's not at all clear that it would have improved with the addition of more pages.I could just as easily say that your quote backs up the notion that "over-writing" is a good thing -- that terseness is not in and of itself a virtue, since clearly large portions of LotR are too dull for many people to read, and yet it is considered a masterpiece by many others. Ergo, the fact that some people (like yourself) find Erikson too dull to read in no way means it is not a masterpiece.S. Morgenstern of course is an invention of William Goldman's, so the example proves nothing at all.</blockquote>

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