The Author Says a Few Words About Style
The style I choose to use has been called “The American Plain Style,” in which the author tries to become as invisible as possible, bringing the reader to see things as if experiencing them along with the character, instead of having a writer constantly commenting and interrupting the flow of the story. Moreover, ever since my days as a playwright I have preferred the bare stage to a realistic set: I found that the less I put on the stage, the more the audience would imagine a much more compelling set than I could ever build. Likewise, in my fiction I describe only as much as is asbsolutely necessary in order to understand what is going on; the rest, the readers create in their own imagination, if they’re willing to use it. I try never to describe anything that the point-of-view character would not notice, because such extraneous descriptions take you out of the story.
All I’ve got to say to that is what Ken Bruen has said:
I like to strip everything to the bone, see if it stands up by itself. The doorstop books – 500 pages and up – Jesus wept, who has that amount of time to piss away. Ninety percent of what I read is padding and I roar, “Get the fuck on with it!”
