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/lit/ - Literature

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12147768 No.12147768 [Reply] [Original]

>“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”

Do you agree?

>> No.12147774

>“Reading long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: spending five hundred pages on an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that you have already read those books and just read a summary, a commentary.”

>> No.12147778

>>12147774
whoa... deep

>> No.12147779

>>12147774
This is what I do

>> No.12147794

>>12147774
Isn’t that what we all do here already?

>> No.12147806

>>12147774
>>“Reading long paragraphs is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness; a better procedure is to tl;dr

>> No.12147819

>>12147768
Yes. This is why short stories and novellas>>>>novels.

>> No.12147823

>>12147768
tldw

>> No.12147824
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12147824

>book opens with this quote
>is 600 pages
(its my book)

>> No.12147845

>>12147768
Yes...

>> No.12147883

>>12147768
No...

>> No.12147895

>>12147883
Why not?

>> No.12147924

I think short stories and novellas have a good future ahead of them considering that most people who read, if they read at all, only do so during commutes, lunch breaks, and the time before bed.

>> No.12147960

>>12147924
And yet ponderous light novels are the rage in China where people probably have even less free time

>> No.12147971

>>12147768
Did he say this before or after he was blinded?

>> No.12147972

>>12147960
>china
And? What does that bugnest have to do with anything?

>> No.12147992

>>12147768

Basically yes. It's good to have a novel explore an idea because you can flesh out the concepts in a simulated reality, to see how they play out. But that really shouldn't take that long. If you're over 50k words for your book, I'm not saying don't go over that, but you should think hard on how necessary a lot of your book is. Especially older books that are so fucking long that people literally professionally edit them down into abridged versions. If you're gonna pontificate and masturbate onto the page for so long that someone has to come in and slice that shit down, you done goofed.

>> No.12147999

>>12147824
underrated post

>> No.12148434

If your primary concern in fiction is ideas like his was, it would make sense to hold this position. It’s cute but this is a board dedicated to real literature.

>> No.12148443

>>12147768
Borges said this because he was unable to write characters. A character needs space and time to develop and for the reader to get to know him or her.