mauve

[Jochen Stremmel]

For me the biggest surprise was that Elmore Leonard actually opened two
books with weather! Must have been early ones, Westerns I presume. Will
look it up the next time I raise from my desk.

2017-03-21 10:57 GMT+01:00 John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>:

> Haven't read it but have read a bunch of stories about it. The author
> probably knew that a book applying data journalism to literature would get
> lots of press. The "somewhat arbitrarily" chosen list of 50 authors is a
> shortcoming, and it would be much more interesting if he'd sorted 500+
> writers, since data journalism with a sample size of 50 is kind of not
> really data journalism.
> But the conclusions he comes to aren't as offensive as I expected and you
> can take them or leave them as you see fit. The observation that 45 percent
> of Danielle Steele's first sentences involve the weather - that's fun. And
> James Patterson's astonishing use of cliche - I know for a fact that
> Patterson just plots his books and farms the actual writing out to
> ghostwriters, so that's no surprise.
>
> On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 8:29 PM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/one-writer-used-s
>> tatistics-reveal-secrets-what-makes-great-writing-180962515/
>>
>> Has anybody of you read this book?
>>
>
>
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