Steven Erikson’s Malazan books would be a lot shorter if he didn’t describe every hill, barrow, rock, and piece of lichen, but he does such a good job of it, I don’t skip. I do skip the chapter intros, which are usually songs, poems, bits of history, theology, philosophy. I think I’m supposed to relate those to the upcoming chapter but it makes my brain hurt to do that.
Same with his fight scenes. They’re extremely detailed and I could just skip ahead and see who won, but I can’t.
Some authors pad with a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and those paragraphs get skipped. I don’t need to know the route you took to get to the crime scene.
This is something I do and may go some way to explaining why I also like reading scripts. With them, it’s dialogue and a bit of scene description; not two and a half pages describing some trees.
That’s been my writing motto for years.
I may skim, but I rarely skip. Only things I actually skip are things written in languages I don’t know and poems/songs.
I thought I was a non-skipper. Then I saw the movie Return of the King, and I was skeptical about the way Minas Tirith was depicted therein. I thought it was a pure Peter Jackson Invention. Then I went back to the book and actually read the entire description of the city, and damned if the movie depiction wasn’t exactly as it was written in the book. I must have completely skipped the description every time I read the book.
However, if you’re a skipper, you’d probably completely miss one of the best chapters in A Tale of Two Cities. It’s the second or third one, I think, describing the progress of a late 18th-century stage up a muddy hill, with the coach passengers warily eying each other and listening for riders approaching in the fog. There’s not much dialogue; it’s pure movie set description from end to end, and I think it’s some of the most perfect writing I’ve ever read.
I will usually skip dream sequences. Seldom have I ever read a dream sequence that added to or advanced a story in any way, and they are inevitably just meandering prose-wanking by the author. (* looking at you, Neal Gaiman! *)
I’m a skimmer. There are times when I just can’t be bothered to read those endless passages where most of the time the writer is just trying to show off and failing miserably.
I recently tortured myself with Brisinger and the only thing that made it bareable was skipping the tedious descriptions. (Paolini needs someone to go torch every single thesaurus he owns and probably every one he’s ever touched or will touch just to be on the safe side.)
The only book I’d actively advocate anyone do any skipping in is Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens. You really can skip or skim most of the America scenes. You won’t miss anything.
Skipper here, just as the OP says. Not so sure if I agree with the other posters because I skipped most of them. If you avoid the descriptions of scenery you can get through the Narnia books in about 15 minutes each.
Every time I come to a poem or song in a story (in LOTR for example) it’s “yaddda, yadda, yadda”. So far none of that stuff has come up in any quizzes.
I don’t skip descriptions, but will sometimes skip songs (particularly on re-reading). When writing, I try to cast necessary descriptions in terms of a character’s observations or reactions, rather than a flat description. It makes them more interesting, reveals something about the character, and (best of all) keeps them from droning on too much.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most of you are suffering from selective memory.
You simply don’t skip most descriptive passages. If you did you wouldn’t have any idea of what most books are about.
What you do is skip a few particularly long and/or bad descriptive passages and remember those because they stand out.
Heck, I’m a huge Zelazny fan and admirer of his writing and I’m on record as skipping his hellrides. But I don’t skip the rest of the descriptions in the Amber novels or in most of his other books.
And I don’t skip the descriptions in Terry Pratchett. Or Douglas Adams. Or Neal Stephenson, because there’s little to his books besides descriptive passages. That’s what you read the books for.
Dozens of authors are like Stephenson. You read them for what they specialize in, for the worlds of minute reality they create with their prose, for the wonders and explanations they give you that you’ve never seen before.
You don’t have to like those books and those authors, just as you don’t have to like those authors whose books are mostly dialog, pages of which are often equally skippable. But if you do like a book or an author, I pretty much guarantee you read the mix of description and action and dialog because that’s what a novel is and if you like reading novels you aren’t cutting out hugely important chunks of them.
Hey–I LOVE descriptive passages. I wish there were more of them (depending on who is writing). Badly written ones (those that are boring to me or have too much detail) I do skip over. Some authors are better at description than others. Some can’t write dialogue to save their souls; others struggle with plot or character development–it’s all harder than it looks, people!
I skip poetry and songs as well. Original poetry in fiction mostly sucks. Songs without melody are just poems in my head.
Agreed. ( ::makes note to read Philip Roth:: ) And also with the Stephen King assessment; but the ham-handed droning of Dickens through all 700 pages of David Copperfield in 7th grade made me vow to never even pick up one of his books again. I think he honestly spent 3 pages describing some dame’s button! (Thank god by the time we read Great Expectations in 9th grade it was the condensed version - “only” 300-some pages.)
I definitely do this! I’m so glad that I’m not alone. I seriously don’t care what color orange the sky or a dress is. But when I go back and re-read, I make sure to read the descriptions. So, it basically takes 2 passes for me to read a book fully.
Holy crap. 11 years later, and I remember that. I always remembered really liking that book. Maybe this is why.
Also, while I agree that describing clothes or the color of anything is completely lost on me, I try not to skip. How could you read Doestoevsky this way?
OTOH, when I see that someone has posted in a thread here without reading all the posts, I find it very rude. (Not addressed to anyone in this thread, just a related issue.)
