Day 54: Captain Obvious

I hate it when the book I'm reading refuses to give me any credit as a reader. The kind of book that doesn't believe I have two braincells to rub together while reading it is the kind of book I put down. Every once in a while I'll get a book like this that repeats itself several times over on every little point, drawing things out and making it read like molasses. The worst offender I've ever read is a book about the great migration called 'The Warmth of Other Suns' by Isabel Wilkerson. Before I roast it, this is actually a great book other than this one offense. It repeats the same set of facts about the great migration at the beginning of at least four chapters. The set of facts takes about two to three pages to restate every time it comes up. That's a lot of extra material to read again. Needless to say, it gets in the way of the powerful narratives that Wilkerson collected across the many hundreds of interviews of black Americans who participated in the great migration. I ended up getting so petty about the literal copy/pasting that I put down an otherwise amazing story. I couldn't stop wondering why this author would ruin their book by being such a captain obvious.

Well I read a chapter I wrote back today and realized I too am captain obvious. Editing is a wonderful thing because it means you can write whatever you please in the moment and let that other guy take care of it in the future. The only issue is when you become that other guy. So yesterday when I became the guy who has to do all the heavy lifting for past me, I realized that most of a chapter I wrote was totally unnecessary because I already covered it in a previous chapter. Ugh.

I don't think Wilkerson would have edited out the repeated text seeing as she probably had to edit it in to begin with, but the experience made me realize that a lot of repeated details in books are probably due to a lack of good memory on the writer's part rather than the alternative. The alternative being that the writer thinks you are an idiot. I don't know if I'll be any more forgiving of this error in other authors in the future, but at least I can understand where it's coming from now.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley