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A Kindle trick changes the reading experience
I recently read the novel "The Pillars of the Earth" and discovered a new trick - on the Kindle, Amazon's digital book reader.
It's something entirely basic and simple in the digital world, but readers have had no easy way to do this, to date, with print-based works. Any e-book reader worth its salt should be able to do it.
"Pillars," if you don't know it, is a huge bestseller from Ken Follett, who otherwise is known for adventure novels - "Code Zero" and that sort of thing. This book is set in 12th century England and involves the building of a Gothic cathedral. The paperback was making the rounds in my office, and I had just bought the Kindle and thought I'd try it out.
And the book - well, I'll say it's a fun story, and the characters are vividly drawn. Fine literature it is not, but that's not what Follett is promising, so fair enough.
On the other hand, with all respect to Mr. Follett, where was the editor who smooths out the text? I empathize with Follett, filling up 400,000 words - you're bound to tap out a cliche or a bad metaphor here or there - and that's why one needs an editor. I couldn't detect one in this book.
The phrase that got me was like a stone in my shoe - noticeable at first, then irritating, then prompting outbursts.
It was "his heart in his mouth."
This is how Follett described a character who was nervous or anxious or frightened. It's not the most refined metaphor to begin with, but there it was - and then a few pages later, someone else's heart was in his mouth - and then, next chapter, another heart in another mouth - and again - more hearts, more mouths - until I finally finished the book and thought, just how many times did Follett use that ONE metaphor in a single book?
Which brings me back to the Kindle.
Digital technology changes the experience of reading books. What might otherwise have taken hours, to scour the text for an irritating phrase, now takes just a few seconds.
And the answer is: 13. Actually 17, if you count the four instances of "her heart in her mouth." (It seems that men are, on the whole, a lot hungrier for coronary snacks.)
The Kindle takes nice screenshots, and here's a representative one of the search results page, for a "heart in his mouth" search:
I don't mean to pick on Ken Follett - he wrote a fun book that's obviously very popular. My point is that the Kindle makes it harder for authors to get away with using a crutch.
And Follett is far from the only author guilty of the practice. A few years ago, before the Kindle, I read a Pulitzer-prize-winning book that had a cliche - the SAME cliche - on almost every other page. I'd reveal it, but I can't yet do the trick to prove my point; it's not digitized for the Kindle. (Yet.)
The question is, will these digital advances force novelists to change their writing style? I can't wait to see. My heart is in... well, you know.
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See also: my customer experience review of the Kindle
LOL, that's funny. I wonder if they will be hiring sharper editors from now on?
Thanks for that Mark. When I've spent a lot of time online and find myself reading a (paper) book, I often find myself reaching for Ctrl + F...
Only an hour ago did I finish an article about "Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See" and number one is crutch words.
http://www.holtuncensored.com/hu/the-ten-mistakes/
thanks for the post. how serendipitous!
Interesting observation. This too is why I enjoy having the PDF and the paper version of technical books. The PDF is great to search when you know the info is in there somewhere.
It seems that what you are suggesting is that the act of search will be democratized in every day literature and will in turn effect the way authors write. I hope so but also look to the word processor. Did this fundamentally change the way we structure literature? Not really. Made it easier. Also, could the writer not have searched for the terms in the text doc to see the cliche pattern? It is possible that 'flipping the coin' and giving uses that ability to search will change things. Only time will tell! I do not have a Kindle but it makes me think about what kind of user/author feedback mechanisms are available!
Mark,
I thought your take on Kindle tech was interesting. As a kid growing up in a southern-style Church of Christ household, we had all manner of Biblery on the shelves. But I always loved the Concordance. It tallied the most oft-used phrases and words in the Bible. I was fascinated by this concept and disappointed that there existed no similar tool to dissect other written works.
For the Bible and other ancient works of religion and philosophy, the concordance serves an important purpose. As both a huge work of spiritual instruction AND the product of many politically diverse groups having to navigate the bureaucracy of editing which stories from what prophets would be included, we are left with a fair amount of dross. There are fun stories, instructional stories and some leftover stories and archaic laws that have no bearing on modern reality. Just by frequency of mention, a Concordance helps the reader cut through the minutiae and concessions that were made to such-and-such family who maybe deserve one mention even though it's not relevant to the message. Put simply, this tool allows absorptive triage.
Engineers call this "built-in redundancy," meaning the more an idea is repeated throughout the text (or manual), the more relevant it is. While there may be one instance where a prophet insists that the Lord expects honest men to keep slaves in a certain way, or to only bid up ten percent on a neighbor's goat, there are probably 30 times the reader is instructed not to kill, probably 50 where he is asked to be kind to neighbors and forgive enemies. It quickly becomes clear where the intentions of the book lie. In a novel or a marketing piece, this repetition becomes cloying. In an instructional manual, it is essential.
I look forward to using this aspect of Kindle, and I hope to get my hands on a tool that lets me do it for my own documents.
As a hobbyist novelist who never hopes to publish, let alone publish a bestseller, it is depressing to see a millionaire author succumb to dreck that wouldn't make it past my FIRST DRAFT. :-)
I too used my Kindle to read Pillars of the Earth. I absolutly enjoyed the experiance. The wonderfull dictionary feature of the Kindle allowed a quick look up some of the tough vocabulary only to discover that words used in the 12th century 'dialog', had roots only as far back as 17th century. Oh well... Read the sequel 'World Without End' and enjoy.
Great post...I've always wondered about redundancies in these novels.
Your observation reminds me of one of the less-edited Harry Potter volumes, where people were "mouthing wordlessly" more than once. Once was enough.
Can you search across books? A Google Books search on shows Follett has been using the phrase since at least 1987. And people have been mouthing wordlessly since at least 1910.
Why do you think a mistake is a mistake?
You know the best thing with an ebook-reader? (i have the sony):
You can eat with both your hands while reading. It's amazing really. Not possible with books before.
It's a close first. Second best is that it knows where in the book you feel asleep last night.
When I'm not a UX/IA type, I do a little freelance editing. If an editor got tired of that metaphor, it wouldn't have taken long to open the soft copy and count up the instances. The technology's been there all along - the problem here is a lazy editor. It will be interesting to see if readers begin making quantifiable complaints though.
Scott
Why not use the Kindle to edit the book? Imagine how great the book would be if people could propose edits and vote on the best!
It would be fun to be able to replace all instances of the cliche with something to make me laugh when I next came to them, perhaps replace "heart" with "foot".
I love this anecdote! I think it was really clever of you to stumble upon this feature of the Kindle. I wish I could say that it will make authors more aware of their pet phrases. One of my favorite writers of yore, Marion Zimmer Bradley, was guilty of putting the same phrase on the same page! That's something you'd think someone would notice while editing, but apparently no one did. She passed away a few years ago, so unfortunately, she can't benefit from the Kindle. But perhaps others will!
@Scott Anderson - "The technology's been there all along - the problem here is a lazy editor." - while I agree with you, I'd also point out that the relevant shift is that the READERS now have the technology, too. In the past, only authors and editors had the power to search the text; now that readers can do it, too, we may see some new and interesting forms of feedback.
@Denver - thanks for the connection to the concordance - and the illuminating comparison between the experience of reading novels and instruction manuals (or Bibles :)
While I don't mean to make a defense of repeated phrases in a novel, I think there is some background missing here, which is the circumstances under which fiction is written and edited. Of course it would be wise for an author to do a search for such repetitions (there's always some overused phrase) before turning in the book, but sometimes deadlines, often more than one, mean there's no time. And, of course, there is not time or space here to discuss the creative process, but I can assure you writing a novel is a complicated and delicate thing. It's really, truly not as simple as wondering why the heck the author didn't notice something so obvious. Really. And sometimes the author is worrying about far more serious issues with a story; its structure, characters and plot, for example.
There is also a decided lack of time, from overworked editors to authors who are sent revisions, galleys or copy edits with very little time to respond. Production schedules are quite tight and delays cost money. With an author like Follet, the publisher's bottom line can be materially affected by a missed or pushed out deadline. Other than debut authors or authors changing genre, popular fiction is typically sold on proposal, not on the basis of a completed manuscript. Editors rely on the author to turn in the completed work on time and in the best shape possible. Unless you're Ken Follet, missing a deadline can be career suicide. As noted, in such a case, the publisher is also looking at their bottom line.
By the time an author turns in one book, he or she is likely jumping right into the next project. Just recently I was finishing one book due on the 15th of a month and five days before that due date I got copy edits for another book, with a due date of the 16th. And the copy editor had taken liberties so I needed to do a very careful read through. Ack!!
As for the Kindle being a vehicle for getting authors and/or editors to fix problems, I have to reply, maybe but I doubt it. There is plenty of pressure from other sources and the realities of publishing with its razor thin margins work against a leisurely editorial process. I have myself gotten long emails from readers detailing everything they felt was wrong with one of my books. And then I get one that does the opposite, for the same book. Readers respond to authors and books differently, sometimes even at different times in their lives.
I wholeheartedly agree that it would be nice if an advance reader, the editor or even the copy editor, had noted the repetition problem so it could be fixed. Sometimes, however, during the editorial process much bigger problems are being addressed, a repetitious phrase might well be the least of the issues being fixed during revisions and the problem might well be introduced during the fix. I can't, of course, speak to what happened with Follet's novel.
All I'm really saying its that for those of us in the trenches, it's not as simple as it seems. If, however, the Kindle does result in some pressure for more editing, I think most authors would welcome that.
With all due respect to Ken Follett, he did not come up the idea of someone being so frightened that their heart is in their mouth. It's been in the language for a long time (I don't have an OED handy or I could quote you the year) and is probably based on the fact that your heart beats faster and harder when you're frightened. Hence the very visceral, physiologically based notion of your heart jumping up into your throat. Follett is due for some righteous criticism, however, for overworking this particular muscle. 17 sightings! Good grief! And we can thank the Kindle for that statistic. Kindle luv. Word.
You do know how to search for words/phrases in the online versions books sold at Amazon and covered by Google, don't you?
I took the liberty of re-posting your article, with credit and links, on our e-book blog - TeleRead. Thanks for a great post. Here's the link:
http://www.teleread.org/blog/
I also notice you were picked up by the Canadian publication Quill & Quire.
Paul
Regarding the other book that you don't want to reveal - have you checked to see if Amazon has the 'search inside' tool available for it? You could do the same test there...
I'm still not sure I would trade this trick for the copy being passed around the office - with others' notes and creases included.
On a related note, Chris Harrison, a PhD student at Carnegie Melon, has created a series of stunning visualizations based on word repetition and cross references in the Bible:
http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/bibleviz/
Interesting... In Spanish, "el corazón en la boca" is quite often used with the same meaning.
On the kindle's search feature, it should show adjacent material BEFORE the sought phrase, as well as after.
Far from a writer...but anytime I'm writing a paper/essay for a grade, I go back through after completion and search for catchphrases, crutches, etc. Just to ensure I haven't overused them. Phrases/words like, "such as", "therefore", "hence", "notwithstanding". Nothing more annoying than reading a paper littered with "nevertheless"-es.
I really am surprised when I find so many authors and editors, whose employment and livelihood is writing, failing to catch their own hooks. Especially in this day and age of word-processing.