PLODDING AL'ON'G THE ROAD

I have little to add in this post to the last post. Let me tell you that the 5th or 6th rewrite of any long piece of fiction is a bore. The plot's in place, the story told. The rewrites continue to be attempts to strengthen the language and appeal by simplification and straightening out the complex sentences that political debating all my life have imposed on my sentence structures. Rhetorical writing is quite different from writing fiction. It calls for complex sentence structures. Lots of clauses and phrases piling up the proofs and facts, lots of qualifiers to make one's arguments specifically clear.

Copied from...

This makes me think of the conservative politician and novelist Disraeli and, perhaps [trying to come up with his name.....trying to come up with....................aha....] Gore Vidal. Long ago I tried to read a Disraeli novel. It's name has escaped me, and it was not bad. I've read two or three of Vidal's novels of political life and I enjoyed them.

The critic Robert O'Kell [writing about Disraeli seems in my opinion to speak to both Disraeli and Vidal], "It is after all, even if you are a Tory of the staunchest blue*, impossible to make Disraeli into a first-rate novelist. And it is equally impossible, no matter how much you deplore the extravagances and improprieties of his works, to make him into an insignificant one."* As to an interesting read alone, I give the nod to Vidal, but perhaps I'm prejudiced by my liberal nature.

*Note how O'Kell piles up the phrases and clauses to make his statement clear. 

*Note the British assignation of "blue" for conservatives.