This is such an interesting thread -great insights all over. From my perspective I have to like the writing itself as a start. I can read a book without chapters or even paragraphs if the writing is great. Even when I read thrillers or something like Bridget Jones' diary, it's the prose itself that gets me first. It doesn't have to be brilliant or complex, but if it is at all cheesy or sloppy, I will definitely stop after 20 pages, regardless of the plot or characters. Then again, I read a book by Javier Marias (in translation), who is considered a potential Nobel prize winner, and had to push myself to finish it because regardless of the perfectly polished prose I didn't like the characters and thought the plot was silly and pointless. So there, I just contradicted myself! I guess to sum up - we read what we like and try to write what we'd like to read.
2 2017-08-16 13:49:03
Re: Lines in literature that make you stop and think. (59 replies, posted in The Write Club -- Creative Writing and Literature Discussions Group)
"Was not the same force at work in himself when he strove in cold fury to liberate from the marble mass of language the slender forms of his art..."
Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
It's a translation of course, but what a translation, what a clear cut vision of a writer at work.
