TMI!
Too Much Information!
November 2006 By Denny Hatch
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In the News
The Great Train RobberyAs the civil war entered its second year in 1862, it was still possible to imagine that the war would be short and relatively bloodless. But nothing that the Union or the Confederacy had accomplished during the previous year had resulted in a decisive advantage, and so soldiers and civilians on both sides began proposing imaginative schemes aimed at ending the war in a single brilliant stroke.
Russell S. Bonds’s masterly “Stealing the General” captures those early days by recounting one such scheme: a Union plot to steal a railroad locomotive deep in the South and race north, leaving destruction in its wake. The theft of the engine called the General—together with the frantic chase that ensued—is one of the most fascinating stories of the Civil War. Mr. Bonds’s compelling narrative and convincing analysis give the episode its due at last.
—J. Tracy Power, Review of “The Great Train Robbery,” The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 10, 2006
When I read the first two paragraphs that appear in the In The News section of this newsletter—a screaming rave review about “The Great Train Robbery,” where a band of Union volunteers traveled incognito into the deep South and hijacked a locomotive with the intention of taking it up north—I decided then and there to order the book.
Alas, the reviewer committed one of The Three Deadly Sins of book reviewing, and talked me out of buying the book.
The good news: I saved $29.95 plus tax.
The bad news: Richard deWyngaert—proprietor of Headhouse Books, a splendid new emporium two blocks from my house—was screwed out of the sale, as were the author and the publisher.
How newspapers deal with book reviews is emblematic of why their circulation is off, why advertising is down, and why they’re becoming vestigial.
It’s an object lesson in how business people must communicate or become vestigial themselves.
The Three Deadly Sins of Book Critics:
Sin #1: Give so much information that there’s no point in buying the book. J. Tracy Power, the reviewer for The Wall Street Journal, is a minor southern literary figure, author of “Lee’s Miserables” and a historian at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Instead of writing a review of this terrific Civil War adventure, Power simply retold the plot in great detail, creating a kind of Cliffs Notes in 1,510 words. By the end of his “review,” I knew the entire story—beginning, middle and end, including the fate of the perpetrators. (Eight were hanged, eight escaped and made their way back north, and six remained in prison for the duration of the war.) Why would a reader buy this book after knowing the entire story and being robbed of any and all suspense? TMI! (Too Much Information!)
Sin #2: Covering two or three books on the same subject in the same review. This is a favorite of book editors—handing off three new titles on Islam to a reviewer, who compares them to one another and leaves the reader totally confused about which to buy. TMI!
Sin #3: Showing off. Many insecure book editors feel compelled to allow their insecure reviewers to bore the hell out of readers by spending three or more paragraphs describing all the author’s prior books before getting to the new one. The purpose of this tiresome exercise is not so much to impart information, but rather to show off the smarts and credentials of a reviewer while making the reader feel stupid. TMI!
Occasionally, a critic will pull this off with a sense of flair and fun, such as the lead by Giles Coren in his Times of London review of “Casino Royale” this past Saturday:
BY HECK, DANIEL CRAIG looks nice in his pants. I haven’t fancied a Bond so much since David Niven. It’s mostly the fact that he has a proper chest. Connery’s you couldn’t see for the rogue pubes on northward manoeuvres, Roger Moore’s was so slack that his nipples were lower than his waistband (though I’ll grant you the waist on those trousers was high) and Pierce Brosnan had that old-man-sucky-tummy-puff-yer-chest-out thing going on, so that he appeared to have an actual embonpoint. But Daniel, with those hoddy’s shoulders and the square-cut trunks … yum, yum.
Why the Current Book Review System is Obsolescent
When my first novel, “Cedarhurst Alley,” was published in 1969, the total number of new titles being brought out by all publishers was 15,000 a year. As a result, my little marshmallow fluff of comedy received a string of nice reviews including one in Time magazine.
Today, 200,000 new titles are being published annually—roughly 4,000 a week. Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review—operating on a 1950s publishing model—covered just 19 new adult titles. NEI! (Not Enough Information!)
For example, Sunday’s Times Book Review cover story was a thumb-sucker of an essay by Jim Windolf on Stephen King’s literary output. Stephen King? Is the publication of his new chiller really worth a 2,339 retrospective when 3,999 other new books last week were crying for attention? TMI!
If the Times were serving its readers … and publishers … and authors … it would bring cogent information about as many new books as possible to its pages and let the windy, self-indulgent critics, bloviate on the Web site.
Dealing With the Information Glut
With so many so-called time-saving devices—cellphone, BlackBerry, voice mail, the Internet, e-mail, washer-dryer, microwave oven, take-out, jet planes—I’m working my head off at a pace like never before in my 71 years. So is everyone I know.
It has to do with exponentially more information—3,000 advertising messages and 200 Spams a day—and how to process it all. TMI!
In a moment of madness, I bought Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 944-page tedious tome, “Team of Rivals,” supposedly about Abraham Lincoln. But she gave equal billing to the personal lives and careers of Edward M. Stanton, Salmon P. Chase, William H. Seward and Edward Bates—all of them crushing bores next to the sparkle and brilliance of our 16th president. I gave up. TMI!
TDB! (Too Damn Busy!)
Awhile back, I did the research and created an outline for a book, “HOW TO WRITE: What Authors Can Learn from the Great Copywriters.”
I laid it on my editor friend at W.W. Norton, who turned up his nose and sniffed, “My authors have nothing to learn from copywriters.”
I tried it out on the publisher of my business books, who had no interest but continues to send me lightweight, elementary marketing books, hoping that I will review them. I take them to the Book Trader.
Now, I’m too busy to spend time looking for a publisher for “HOW TO WRITE …” and too busy to publish it myself. Besides, with 200,000 new books a year, it would never get noticed.
Too bad.
The great copywriters are masters of absorbing vast amounts of information and regurgitating only what matters. Their work is read where much (if not most) of everyone else’s output—memos, letters, résumés, white papers, special reports, articles, books, e-mails and blogs, with their excesses of information, turgid prose and gray walls of type—is skimmed, scanned, laid aside or ignored completely.
Sigh …
Takeaway Points to Consider:
* Are you writing for yourself or for your reader?* Are you giving useful background and/or actionable information, or are you showing off how much you know?
* Chances are, your lead will be found somewhere in the second or third paragraph of your first draft.
* Avoid “gray walls of type.”
* “Use short words, short sentences, short paragraphs.”
—Andrew J. Byrne
* “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
—Ernest Hemingway
* “Use specifics to add power and credibility.”
—Don Hauptman
* “Copy is for the ear as well as the eye. When writing copy, pause every paragraph or so and read aloud. Do you keep stumbling over certain words or phrases? If so, it needs rewriting. Does it flow smoothly and easily? If not, rewrite. After all, if you can’t read your own stuff, who can?”
—Jack Maxson
* “Remember that your readers are as smart as you are.”
—Jim Rutz
* “It takes hard writing to make easy reading.”
—Robert Louis Steveson
* Those who can, do. Those who can’t, become critics.
Web Sites Related to Today's Edition:
A Prose Primer by Nancy Kresshttp://tinyurl.com/wuwpp
An Extraordinary Writer’s Resource: “Gabay’s Copywriters’ Compendium
http://www.gabaywords.com/
Companies Mentioned:
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