....or is it?

I recently tweeted a wonderful quote from Dr Seus:

"The writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”

Let me add to that a quote of my own:

"Nothing happens in movies unless it's for a reason."

The same can be said of television as well.  When you have a finite amount of time you have to make every second or minute count.  There's no time for spurious characters or bits of plot that do not lead anywhere.

The same cannot be said to be true of books, or can it?  Sure you have a medium which is only really governed by the number of pages of text you produce so you can write whatever plot arcs you want and create and dismiss characters to your heart's content.

Especially in a digital format where the physical cost of producing a book is non-existent.

But just because you can add inconsequential plot lines and pointless characters to you book should you?

I ask this because it's one of the things that I have been focussing on as I run through a final edit of George and the Dragon.

I've already discussed killing off one character to make his existence have a greater resonance throughout the book.   I have also removed a minor naval battle that had no purpose and several smaller incidences of character conversations that led nowhere.

I hope in doing so to a: keep the novel under 100,000 words and b: make it easier to read or, as Dr Suess would put it, less of a chore.