OAK FOREST — I would be terribly remiss if, as a writing instructor, I left unanswered the Tribune’s question about romance novelist Nora Roberts: “So why doesn’t she get any respect?” in “Love Conquers All, Sorta” (Tempo, April 23). The answer can be found in the first paragraph that the Tribune excerpted from her best seller “Three Fates,” in which Roberts used the following phrases while describing a character: “smooth and silky,” “hot and sultry,” “full, red slicked mouth” and “sipped idly.”
If those word pairs sound familiar, it’s because they’re cliches — overused phrases whose repetition has destroyed their power to evoke feeling or sensuality. These are phrases I circle when I’m marking up my students’ papers –phrases that are symptomatic of a lazy, hurried, unoriginal, uninspired writing style. And Roberts had six in the first 11 lines of the random passage! Is it any wonder that Roberts has published 145 novels while artists like Ann Beattie or Annie Prolux toil to produce less than a dozen novels in a comparable time period?
It’s because Roberts’ goal is to finish and sell books, so she uses language that is handy and inevitably insipid to plow through her story, while the literary Beattie and Prolux research and strain to craft fresh and thought provoking art. That’s the difference between best-selling books and literary masterpieces. If Nora Roberts were doing the Sistine Chapel, she’d use a paint sprayer and would be done in a week.
— David McGrath
