Tar the Padders But Pity the Marners---by Reb MacRath
A quick tour--even a virtual one--of any bookstore's fiction shelves will be enough to convince you of this: the fight to survive under ironclad rules governing minimum word count has led too many writers to pad for dear life. Check out the opening pages of book after book if you want shocking proof that writers at large are becoming a tribe of Word Accountants. And as you read, you'll hear the clicking of their calculators' keys and picture the poor bastards working it out: 'OMG, I'm 10K words under...so I need to add--let me see...at least 30 (or 40 or 50) words to every page. What if I add 15 adjectives or adverbs per page plus 20 to 30 extra words of dialogue or description? How about 2000 words of research here and, say, 1500 there?" They should be tarred on Live TV. But you know what they say about horses. The Padders aren't the worst offenders. They're easily spotted, at least, and they can be ignored. Their counterparts--the Marners--real...