For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words.
“It was a fine cast and lots of fun to make, but they did the damn thing on the cheap. The backdrops had holes in them, and it was shot on the worst film stock.”
“Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.”