Victor Hugo was the CHAMPEEN of padding. I read Les Miserables after the musical hit the stage, and while I enjoyed the book (I still consider it to have been a rewarding read, even with the distance of a decade), it was so incredibly and unnecessarily padded. To. The. GILLS! There is a chapter with 40 pages of the incredibly detailed history of a character who appears NOWHERE BUT THAT CHAPTER! At the end of the chapter, this character completely disappears, but the weight of his history still clings to your shoulders like a sack full of lead.
Most of one chapter is dedicated to the history and technical specifications of manufacturing jet jewelry. Another 20-some pages, dedicated to what is, essentially, deep background that ceases to be relevant to the main narrative within another chapter or two.
Yet another long explanation of the sociopolitical ramifications of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, as deep background to the relation between a character and another character’s father.
And the scary thing is that I think I was reading the abridged version!
IMHO, Mr. RR is a top shelf writer. A fantasy realist, if you will. Regarding the series you mentioned, all I can say is that sometimes less is more (Great thread idea = Is more ever less?). That being said, I believe his writing is great and would not say that the series is overly padded.
In the fantasy realist sense, he reminds me of Robin Hobb, a writer who’s novels are intensely readable and epic without being epically massive. To this day, Hobb’s novels rank among my favorite. I highly recommend them. Take it from the guy with a cool doper name. (Dude with a PhD said it was cool so it is…dig?)
I have read the unabridged version, though in other respects I don’t consider myself a masochist. The amazing thing is that I still consider it one of my favorite novels.
I “read” the unabridged version. But, by halfway through, whenever I hit upon one of those sections, I’d start scanning until I found a character name and start actually reading again. I’m just not all that interested in the political implications of night soil.
Harry Turtledove could have shaved off an entire book if he quit repeating himself. How many times did we need to read that Sam Carsten was a fair skinned man and whatever sunblock they used at the time didn’t really keep him from getting sun burned.
I don’t think that Moby Dick really applies but I seem to recall that there was a chapter on the rending of whale oil that didn’t seem to move the plot along.
The Left Behind series. All of them would have benefited by being cut at least 40%, and you could have left out at least two of them altogether.
And I concur on King - I read the unedited version of The Stand. The edited version is one of his better efforts. The unedited version is the same novel buried in dreck.
I think a lot of people skip over Galt’s speech. I know I did, because I figured by that point I’d gotten her philosophy and could safely skip it without losing much of the plot line of the book.
And Christ, Jean Auel, could you describe *one more time *how the permafrost is creating the verdant landscape that Jondalar and Ayla are Pleasuring each other through? Sometimes I wonder if it’s just a show-off…See? I did all this research! I looked up things in books and asked experts! I can’t be bothered with working it into the story, because this is my fifth novel in the series and I have the publisher eating out of my hand. So, I shall just data dump it for you.
If “padding” is anything that doesn’t directly advance the plot or reveal character, than almost all of Moby-Dick is padding. Aside from the usual 19th-century verbosity detailed descriptions of then-contemporary whaling practices, and loads of atmosphere and foreshadowing, entire chapters are devoted to digressions into etymology, biology, and cultural anthropology, much of which is more fanciful or metaphoric than scientific.
ETA: It took me so long to write those two sentences that someone beat me to the punch by several minutes. No Herman Melville I. I’ll just add that in this case (as in many others), the “padding” is the point.
I guess that explains why the first title that came to mind when I saw the thread title was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Would’ve been a decent 15-to-20-page short story, but at 200 pages or whatever it is, it’s totally overdone.
as I’ve said before, I think a shift like this happened earlier – I suspect Mark Twain’s two hilarious pieces criticizing James Fennimore Cooper’s writing style came about because by Twain’s time the wordy style of Cooper’s time had fallen out of favor. To Twain’s ears, and certainly to modern ones, Cooper’s descriptions are filled with excess, pointless verbiage. But I haven’t seen any contemporary criticisms on that score.
on the other hand, Dickens, Poe, Irving, and others from that time are pretty wordy themselves. This was strongly brought home to me when I tried to interest my 12 year old daughter in a recording of Vincent Price reading Poe’s The Gold Bug. She had absolutely no interest (although she loves all the basic story elements), and couldn’t follow it at all. Yet the story had actually been somewhat abridged for reading. It was while listening to it while she was there that I realized just how needlessly ornate the writing was (by my standards). I could easily see Twain taking a blue pencil to all those words. “And beneath that point i thought it likely that a deposit of value lay.” – why not just say you thought that a treasure was buried there?
That’s what I thought of. I liked the book a lot, but it’d be more honest to call it 'Many Essays About How Freaking Weird Whales Are If You Think About It, and a Novella About a Crazed Captain."
But that’s not padding, the digressions are the novel. (And that’s one book you wish would never end.)
I take padding to be material that’s simply stuffed into the book because the author realizes he hasn’t got a large enough word count to satisfy his publisher or whatever.
I actually liked the vingettes in The Stand that had to do with how survivors died after having come through the plague unscathed. It made all the survivors (not just the ones followed in the story) seem like real people who had lost everything. The Long Desert Trek, OTOH, was definately skippable.
I came in to mention Jean Auel, but ivylass beat me to it. Dear Lord, that woman needs an editor who’ll stand up to her!
Yeah. The difference is that, unlike Monty Python, Fanthorpe wasn’t obviously trying to be funny. He was trying to meet his word count. This isn’t an isolated incident – the book is made up of such stuff.
Then he gives his characters names like “Ishklaah”. Aaargh!