LETTERS
A publishing machine
Published April 26,
2002
OAK FOREST -- I would be terribly
remiss if, as a writing instructor, I left unanswered the Tribune's question
about romance novelist Nora Roberts: "So why doesn't she get any respect?"
in "Love Conquers All, Sorta" (Tempo, April 23). The answer can be found
in the first paragraph that the Tribune excerpted from her best seller
"Three Fates," in which Roberts used the following phrases while describing
a character: "smooth and silky," "hot and sultry," "full, red slicked
mouth" and "sipped idly."
If those word pairs sound familiar, it's because they're cliches -- overused
phrases whose repetition has destroyed their power to evoke feeling or
sensuality. These are phrases I circle when I'm marking up my students'
papers --phrases that are symptomatic of a lazy, hurried, unoriginal,
uninspired writing style. And Roberts had six in the first 11 lines of
the random passage! Is it any wonder that Roberts has published 145 novels
while artists like Ann Beattie or Annie Prolux toil to produce less than
a dozen novels in a comparable time period?
It's because Roberts' goal is to
finish and sell books, so she uses language that is handy and inevitably
insipid to plow through her story, while the literary Beattie and Prolux
research and strain to craft fresh and thought provoking art. That's the
difference between best-selling books and literary masterpieces. If Nora
Roberts were doing the Sistine Chapel, she'd use a paint sprayer and would
be done in a week.
-- David McGrath
Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune
