I think I have a new metric for a good, lasting writer: how well can you remember the characters and plot from an author when someone simply mentions the title?<\/p>\n
For example, if you mention Hamlet<\/em> or Macbeth<\/em> or any other Shakespeare play that I’ve read, I can remember the plot and some of the characters within it. If you mention a Dickens book, I can probably speak to it generally.<\/p>\n Now, about modern writers, my favorites are at a bit of a loss. When you mention Robert B. Parker, I can talk about the early books pretty well, but once you get past Pastime<\/em>, they start to blur. John Sandford? Not hardly, although I’d try to bluff and say it was about a murderer who posed the bodies ritualistically. John D. MacDonald? Some of them, and I’ve enjoyed all of them. Raymond Chandler? I don’t think I could remember or explain a lot of Chandler’s plots if I’d just read them. Robert Heinlein? He wrote a lot of junior rocket jockey stuff that kind of blurs.<\/p>\n Stephen King, on the other hand, I can tell you the plots of It<\/em>, Christine<\/em>, The Stand<\/em>, The Eyes of the Dragon<\/em>, and so on and so forth.<\/p>\n Tom Clancy? You bet, although I’d be hard pressed to remember all the subplots and plot lines in Debt of Honor<\/em>, but I remember the bit about the quality problem at the auto plant.<\/p>\n I think that the size of the oeuvre matters, as an author with fewer books will have more memorable books, or at least fewer books to confuse. Relevant titles help, too, which really hurts modern series authors who title their books similarly so readers will know the book belongs to a series. <\/p>\n So what do you think? Of whom you’ve read widely, whom do you recollect the individual novels the best? And do you think this is a mark of an author who will be widely read and regarded as a classical author in centuries to come?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I think I have a new metric for a good, lasting writer: how well can you remember the characters and plot from an author when someone simply mentions the title? For example, if you mention Hamlet or Macbeth or any other Shakespeare play that I’ve read, I can remember the plot and some of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6510"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6512,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510\/revisions\/6512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}