I’ve got a counter example, actually. The first book in the Wheel of Time series is absolute garbage. Books 2-4 take off, and then starting with around book 5, we see the bloat that is referred to here. I got really pissed at the book where they recounted all the events from the previous book from a different character’s perspective…and from characters that were nearly universally despised.
And Pterry improved hugely as he went along; Colour of Magic isn’t very good. Discworld gets good around about Mort and improves from there for quite a while. He never let himself write ridiculously long tomes, either.
I always thought Angry Teen Harry was a good realistic touch. A real 15-yo boy would be pretty angry at that point. But yeah, the books get bloated and are in dire need of editing. I’m not a big HP fan and have never re-read them, so I can’t say much else; I’m perfectly willing to believe that the plots aren’t tight.
Also, “wotcher” is British slang for hello–Urban Dictionary says it’s from “What’cha up to?” All I know is, people in Asterix comics use it a lot so I’ve always associated it with Roman legionaries.
I can’t imagine what would constitute an “authoritative” cite, unless you were trying for a strained pun.
However, it’s common talk throughout the industry that diarrhea of the typewriter afflicts many ultra-successful writers. Robert Heinlein got 60,000 words chopped out of Stranger in a Strange Land but insisted on publishing every comma thereafter when that sold a million. (And published all the stuff that got taken out many years later.) Stephen Jay Gould collected his essays seventeen to a book (because that’s what Isaac Asimov did) but his first collection is half the page count of his later collections. Ed McBain did fantastic taut gritty 150-page novels in his 87th Precinct series in the late 1950s and bloated 400-page novels in the 1980s. Even Stephen King’s books got fatter and that’s from a fat start. I know of dozens of examples in every genre that I could point to.
Editors go along with it for several reasons. The foremost is that they don’t want to author to walk. Publishers care only about sales, not quality. They are highly subject to blackmail. But editors care less than you would think because the books not only continue to sell, they probably sell better. That’s because the vast majority of book buyers of bestsellers literally can’t tell a well-written book from a badly written one. What they want is to spend more time in the author’s world. Fat, bloated books allow them to spend more time and make them think they’re getting more for their money. And if they think so, then they are, no matter what critics’ opinions might be.
Regarding bloat: I think a lot of successful writers succumb to thinking they don’t need editing. Of the writers who avoided bloat (imho, Crichton and King did fairly well, although the latter’s problem wasn’t bloat…just crappy story ideas) they generally hired (or, in King’s case, married) a personal editor.
In Writer’s Digest, editors complain about this all the time. They don’t understand why writers can’t believe the editor is trying to make the book better. In nearly every case, the writer feels that the editor is trying to harm “their baby.” Regarding a cite, iirc, there’s been an editor’s complaint about this in every issue of Writer’s Digest in the past year.
I think another factor in Jo Rowlings’ case was the huge demand for the next book. When she was finished writing, the publishers wanted to get those books on the shelves ASAP, and if some of the needed editing fell by the wayside, so be it.
I would actually pinpoint the moment when Harry became an adult to be near the end of the sixth book, when he apparates himself and Dumbledore out of the cave. All this time it’s been Dumbledore rescuing Harry, and now he’s finally able to return the favor.
And I don’t think that lack-of-editoritis always manifests as bloat, nor do I think that bloat is the primary reason for the Harry Potter books getting longer. The Potter books getting longer can be explained simply by virtue of the target audience aging: Each book is written for a reader of Harry’s approximate age. Older readers can handle more complex stories, and the longer books that are needed to tell those stories. On the other point, I’ve certainly seen books where an editor (or some other form of pre-publication criticism) was needed, but it can manifest in leaving out important things, as well as in adding superfluous things. Some books have about the right amount of writing in them, but it’s the wrong writing. Like, the author has wasted so many pages, that they have to call in a deus ex machina to wrap it all up in a reasonable length.
Book 4 of Harry Potter is tremendously overlong, because it tells the same story three times: one for each of the Quidditch matches. Nothing is gained from doing it three times. It doesn’t advance the story or the characters. Sheer bloat. I stopped reading after that so I can’t comment further, but the length for audience theory doesn’t work for me.
Regarding Harry’s maturity cycle, I think the opposite was true: he was far more mature in the early books than the later books, which made his angst that much more annoying. The worst part to me was after say book 3, he started to become more and more of a bully.
I’ve observed plenty of that in real life as well. I’ve known plenty of eleven or twelve year olds who were perfectly sensible and intelligent – until puberty came along and messed them up.
Interesting–I’ve never heard Harry described as a bully before. Can you elaborate?
In the later books, he’s actually the aggressor in meetings with Malfoy. He also tortures Dudley and loses his temper quite often, especially with Hufflepuffs. On several occasions, he’s needlessly cruel to Hermoine and Ron, such as in book 5 where he thinks they were deliberately avoiding him during the vacation and he’s very cruel in book 7 to both Ron and Hermoine, especially when he thinks they are talking about him behind his back. Malfoy, in particular, after say book 4, is pretty much victimized by everyone.
While the understanding is that he’s paying people back for past deeds, it comes across as needless and cruel, particularly when it’s clear he is far more powerful than anyone else his age.
Uh, “Weasley is our King”? The Inquisitorial Squad? Threatening Harry after Lucius is sent to Azkaban, and then trying to attack Harry on the train home? The cursed necklace, the poisoned mead, breaking the Death Eaters into Hogwarts?
I apologize – my only reason for criticizing Rowling’s writing is the sprained larynx that still hurts almost a decade after reading the same damn description of Uncle Vernon’s purple face aloud, verbatim, for what seemed like the third or fourth time, and nobody at the publishing company bothering to suggest so much as a synonym though they must have been even more sick of it than I was.
J.K. Rowling managed to sit at a typewriter or computer keyboard long enough to compost several old and modern heroic fantasies and force them into a traditional 1930’s-era schoolboy novella template and create something that made lots and lots of money. She may not even be aware enough to realize how little of her work is original, but that doesn’t matter either – as Superhal notes, she clearly has bigger psychological fish to fry.
On the whole escalating length thing – in my opinion that’s not to do with bad editing or bad writing, it’s a fundamental limitation of the novel as an art-form. Once you go beyond a certain length (say, 60-70 thousand words), it becomes impossible to maintain a tight focus. The longer it grows, the more complex it becomes. The more complex it becomes, the more explanation it requires, and the more detailed the setting has to be. But as a writer, the more you have to explain, the more you risk contradicting yourself, exposing the weaknesses of your inventions, or breaking the reader’s suspension of disbelief.
It’s not that Rowling, George R R Martin, Robert Jordan, or any of those people become worse writers towards the end than they were at the beginning, or that editors stop doing their jobs. Frankly, I think it’s a bit glib to make that argument. No. I think that, in expanding single story arcs out to such an excessive length, these writers are really straining the novel form to breaking point. (Indeed, Martin’s inability to finish his series suggests to me that he might actually have broken it.)
Terry Pratchett was mentioned above. And I think the Discworld novels are an excellent illustration of how writers could avoid that problem. For a start, the novels are mostly episodic. The Light Fantastic is the only true sequel in the whole series. Discworld novels might not seem episodic, because sometimes changes are allowed to stand. Vimes is first the Captain of the Nightwatch, then the commander of the watch, and then a duke. But these changes are never allowed to intrude upon the plot of subsequent novels. You can read The Fifth Elephant without having read Guards Guards, and you won’t miss anything important. Those little bits of details from previous novels that reappear later are more just Easter eggs, for long term readers. If you’ve read Small Gods, it makes you smile when you realize the Omnian’s subsequently becomes the Discworld equivalent of Jehovah’s Witnesses. And even if you haven’t, well, the JWs reference is pretty obvious anyway. It’s a clever approach to the problem of series continuity.
The other smart choice Pterry made early on is not to focus on the one setting or the one group of characters. Not every Discworld novel is set in Ankh-Morpork, or has Rincewind the Wizard as its principle character. So when things start to get a little bit overcrowded, he simply sets it all aside and goes off to focus on some other place and group of characters, and we get to read their stories. So the Discworld novels, though they’re all Discworld novels, technically aren’t all part of the same series. It’s an excellent foil to the repetitiveness of ordinary episodic books, that tend to tell the same story over and over again.
As you know, half of those were because he was under orders from voldemort, he was scared out of his mind, and he was trying to protect his family from being killed.
Quoth Exapno:
I think you must be getting confused, here, because Book 4 is the one without Quidditch. Well, at least, without Harry playing Quidditch; there’s the World Cup at the beginning, but that’s only one game.
I think Expano is referring to the fact that nearly all the Quidditch matches end in exactly the same way. 
It’s an amazingly boring game though. In the early books they number of points mattered, but later it didn’t.
The themes that Harry Potter deals with, love, death, xenophobia, shades of grey morality are remarkably adult in nature.
[quote=“Chronos, post:26, topic:550943”]
Except books 4-7 are bloated. The endless camping in 7, for example–even huge HP fans admit that went on too long.
The big problem here is that these don’t really impact the main plots much. It’s easd, as Rowling does, to toss in background material. And there’s nothing wrong with it. But nothing particularly comes of it and it doesn’t have much to do with the resolution of anything except maybe Book 5, and that was only a subplot.