Dan and Padding.

Robert and Sophie are sitting beside one another in the cab of a truck. They’re at the bottom of a drive leading to a chateau, and Robert has to lean over her to speak into the intercom that will get the gates open. Quote:

Robert smelled Sophie’s perfume and realised how close they were.

Now, when you’re sprawled across the form of an attractive 32-year-old woman who has unstyled burgundy hair framing the warmth of her face, you don’t need to smell her perfume to realise how close she is, do you?

This is typical of what I gather is a favoured ploy among best selling authors and their publishers who want to make lots of money out of them. Padding – puerile and pointless words stuffed into the narrative at every opportunity so as to increase the distance from the front cover to the back. This is so that the buying public will think they’re getting a lot of story, when what they’re actually getting is relatively little story inflated with a load of hot air. There’s a lot of it in The Da Vinci Code.

Somebody who read my story The Gift Horse said:

‘It’s a good story, well written, but it isn’t long enough to be a novel.’

‘I know. It’s a novella.’

‘Well, why don’t you pad it out to twice the length, then it will be worth considering for publication?’

‘Because then it wouldn’t be well written, would it?’

There is no such thing as quality literature. There are books that sell and books that don’t

 ~ An ex-Prime Minister, now late.