Like the title says, James Patterson is a quite prolific writer and pumps out a lot of work, his stories are great and I love the tension he builds. BUT! The chapter lengths bother me so damn much! 2-4 page chapters? Really?!? I can get it if you’re bouncing from perspective to perspective to keep the story flowing, but several short chapters that follow one scene is completely pointless to me.
Sorry, had to get it out.
by MajorMcSkaggus
6 Comments
Lots of writers do this. The ones that ghostwrite for James Patterson, for example.
I enjoyed one and only one, I think it is named Sundays at Tiffany’s. Can’t remember for sure. That is absolutely it, the rest is unreadable.
So glad to see someone else feels the same way. He just uses too many words! lol
Not a huge fan of repeated short chapters here (save for the occasional short one that uses brevity to make a point. On the whole, I’m more interested in the content than the length of a chapter.
One of my biggest pet peeves is ridiculously short chapters. Even Stephen King does this, which is annoying in principle, but he does it quite successfully to build tension in his stories. I think chapters should be long enough to fully encompass a topic by having a clear beginning, middle, and end. I love that the Harry Potter books do this exceptionally well.
He would have to actually write to have a writing style.
What annoys you is the bare-bones minimalism he imposes on his ghost writers, lest any of them write something that would make his prolific use of ghost writers really really obvious.