Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Another schoolboy book. Again, the attitude among the intellectuals was that Dumas wasn’t good enough. It’s taken the French 200 years to realise that telling a good story is actually worthwhile and they’re putting statues up now. All the snooties said: “Tell a story and make money! Good God, what a terrible thing to do!” I openly tried to write a modern version of it in A Prisoner of Birth. You see, in those days, Dumas’s days, there were no blogs, nothing like that. I mean 1,700 pages! You’d never write that today. Nobody would read it. If you are writing a long novel it’s 500 pages and that’s enough, thank you very much. Today he’d be writing television scripts.
Nothing short about the Dumas.
No. I realise looking at my choices that I should have read them when I was 14. I must have read this actually when I was 16. But it’s another schoolboy book. Again the attitude among the intellectuals was that Dumas wasn’t good enough. It’s taken the French 200 years to realise that telling a good story is actually worthwhile and they’re putting statues up now. All the snooties said: “Tell a story and make money! Good God, what a terrible thing to do!” I openly tried to write a modern version of it in A Prisoner of Birth. You see, in those days, Dumas’s days, there were no blogs, nothing like that. I mean 1,700 pages! You’d never write that today. Nobody would read it. If you are writing a long novel it’s 500 pages and that’s enough, thank you very much. Today he’d be writing television scripts.
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Jeffrey Archer is a novelist, playwright, actor and former Conservative politician. His 25 books are published in 63 countries and more than 32 languages, with international sales exceeding 250 million copies. He was made a life peer by the Queen in 1992 and served two years in prison for perjury in 2001.
