Book Critic Matt Taibbi of the NY Press has great fun trashing Thomas Friedman’s new book  THE WORLD IS FLAT. I’ve never read Friedman, and never will, but I thought the review was hilarious. Here’s an excerpt:

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent  passages invite feature-length essays. I’ll give you an example, drawn at random
from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.
This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s
absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of
dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every
single time. He never misses.

Taibbi doesn’t just take potshots at Friedman — he also analyzes the substance of Friedman’s thesis, such as it is. But for me, this review will always hold a special place in my heart for this observation:

Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears
malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

Surely, this is the first time Bob Denver and FAR OUT SPACE NUTS have ever been referred to in literary criticism…and I, for one, hope it’s not the last.

A writer-friend of mine was lamenting the fact that, in this
ever-more-competitive publishing world, tie-ins are crowding out
paperback original fiction off the shelves (particularly sf/fantasy novels) in three
ways:

1)publishers are buying less material that doesn’t have a
"pre-sold" audience
2)books that ARE published are being pushed off the
shelf very quickly to make room for new tie-in work that comes out in regular
cycles.
3)backlists of original fiction are crowded out by the back-list of
tie-in work, which are re-issue and re-stocked every time a new tie-in in a series comes out, which can be often as monthly. She cited the hundreds of STAR TREK titles and twenty-five MURDER SHE WROTE
books as examples.

It’s probably true that, in today’s tough market, a publisher is more likely to take a risk on a tie-in — which comes with a pre-sold audience and a ready market — than with an original novel by an unknown author. But I don’t know that its any different than movie makers being more likely to greenlight a sequel to a hit than an original film…or for a network to prefer CSI:SEATTLE to just another cop show. Sure, corporations are risk-adverse and prefer going with proven commodities… but original movies are still getting made, original shows are still getting produced, and original novels are still being published.

That said, I stopped by a Barnes & Noble today and couldn’t help noticing that 75% of the paperbacks on the "New Science Fiction" table were STAR TREK, STAR WARS or other tie-in/licensed books. The LA Times reports today that Pocket Books now puts out 20 books a year in their various STAR TREK lines…and plans to do so through at least 2007.

Since Pocket Books began issuing "Trek" novels in the late ’70s, for example
(Bantam and Ballantine published a handful of originals and adaptations earlier
in the decade), more than 500 "Star Trek" titles have hit the nation’s
bookshelves, selling tens of millions of copies.

Your thoughts?

Authors don’t win much respect, at least not from critics, when they write a book-a- year…or more. Words like "hack" begin to get bandied about whenever the author’s name comes up. If a book is written quickly, does that automatically mean it’s bad? Is less creativity, emotion, and care invested in a book that’s written in three months instead of three years? Apparently, the assumption is yes. A book that’s written quickly must not be as good as one that’s written slowly…or that something isn’t quite right with the author. For instance, the folks over at Booksquare recently said:

Prolific writers are viewed with distrust. Nobody should be able to produce so
many words in so short a time. It isn’t seemly. It probably isn’t healthy. It
surely isn’t literary. It’s like a Tom Waits song. “What’s he building in
there?”

My  sister-in-law Wendy pondered on her blog:

I often wonder about writers who crank out book after book and speculate as to
how they do it. The quality of books written in warp drive aside,
I’m curious if authors like Nora Roberts sleep and eat as the rest of the
population? Do they ever go back and rewrite, rework,
retool? I can’t imagine that they do, there doesn’t seem to be
time. Do they have moments of self doubt? Do they
ever question or second guess? Are there ever moments when a
character’s motivation, a plot point, or the perfect bit of dialog is just
out of reach, tormenting them with its nearness? Don’t they
have moments when the only answer is to walk away from a story and let the
pieces drift back in, falling into the perfect places?

In the book world, writers who are fast and prolific are suspect…but this wasn’t always the case. In the heyday of pulp novels, guys like Harry Whittington wrote several books a year. And they were great.  In fact, his speedily-written paperbacks are better than many of the hardcover thrillers out today…thrillers that took some of the authors a year or more to write.

When I buy a book, I don’t care how fast it was written or how many more books the author has coming this year… as long as the books are good. That should be the measure.

But it’s not.

In the TV business,  it’s different. Writers who are fast and prolific are admired, celebrated and sought-after.  It’s not uncommon for episodes of TV shows, including the most highly regarded series on TV, to be written in a week or less. Yet, nobody assumes the episodes are badly written simply because they were written fast. The audience expects a new episode every week, 22 weeks or more a year, and they don’t give any thought to the time it takes to write them… all they want is a good show. In fact, networks expect writers to be fast and prolific…those who aren’t soon find it very difficult to get staff jobs.

I’ve got my feet in both the book and TV worlds. I’m primarily a TV writer…but lately I have been writing paperbacks originals, too. I’ve been trained by my years in TV to write fast, to deliver well-crafted stories on a tight deadline.  So I didn’t think twice about signing a deal that will require me to write four books — two DIAGNOSIS MURDERs and two MONKS — in the next 12-14 months.  Sure, I thought about how I was going to manage my time, and balance my TV and book committments, but I didn’t give any thought to how writing a book every three-to-four months would reflect on  me as an author  (then again, since the books are TV tie-ins, I know the assumption in the book community is that they are hack work anyway).

Why are speedily-written books suspect… but speedily-written screenplays are not?