The New York Times has an an oh-so New York Times series of advice articles by successful established authors to aspiring writers. I find the premise irritating for a whole slew of reasons which probably stem from my irritability more than anything else. But that aside, I was genuinely baffled by Elmore Leonard’s tidbit #10:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

Do people skip parts in books? I never, ever do. If the shit’s getting tedious, I quit the book. Is this not the norm?

A friend alerted me to another particularly heinous piece of writing in this Sunday’s papers—this time, in the Times. It’s an oh-so New York article about glass buildings and what they tell us about ourselves in the topsy-turvy internet world we’ve chosen to inhabit.

Things that grate:

Graft’s peekaboo interiors are a sly commentary on a culture that continues to find new ways to display ever more intimate, and mundane, details of domestic life. In a YouTube world, one’s home is no longer one’s private retreat: it’s just a container for the webcam.

Besides the ghastly ‘YouTube world’ coinage which betrays an uptight know-nothingness about technology, that last sentence as a whole is only semi-sensical. It’s written in that airy Times style which soothes the wealthy white man’s soul, which makes him think he’s reading something profound when in fact he’s just wasting his Sunday morning.

City life has always been to some degree a public performance, and one of its pleasures is the opportunity to catch a glimpse of other habitats, to watch the movie of others’ lives through a half-drawn curtain, as Jimmy Stewart did in “Rear Window.”

I thought city life was about restaurants and bars and clubs and museums and shopping, and not having to own a car. The semi-conspiratorial tone here is particularly off-putting, again exuding this safe, bourgeois faux-transgressiveness that white-bread New Yorkers are famous for¹. Further note to author: gratuitous Hitchcock references make your prose more bland, not less.

But in the same way overheard phone conversations used to be tantalizing until cellphone use reached saturation point—“I’m on 14th and Fifth,” bellows the guy into his Bluetooth, and your ear—ogling other people’s apartments is no longer so appealing, and holds about the same narrative punch as the inane muffin video (homemade by some teenager in his kitchen) my daughter watches over and over on YouTube.

I honestly plead ignorance: has Bluetooth really become a Xerox brand? Because I have a Bluetooth mouse, and have used Bluetooth to transfer data from my cell phone to my computer. Maybe I’m just tone-deaf to normal casual non-nerd usage. Leaving that aside, though, when did ogling other people’s apartments hold narrative punch?

This is insight into the mind of a young writer who came to New York to “make it”, who’d walk around, looking inside people’s apartments through windows, trying to imagine how they live, all the while writing a great New York novel in her head. Honey, you’re a walking cliché².

All said, though, it’s a superior piece to the WaPo equivalent. At least there are no painful neologisms driving me to claw my eyes out.