Stardust
E-book extra: Neil Gaiman's "Writing and the Imagination."In the tranquil fields and meadows of long-ago England, there is a small hamlet that has stood on a jut of granite for 600 years. Just to the east stands a high stone wall, for which the village is named. Here, in the hamlet of Wall, young Tristran Thorn has lost his heart to the hauntingly beautiful Victoria Forester. And here, one crisp October eve, Tristran makes his love a promise -- an impetuous vow that will send him through the only breach in the wall, across the pasture... and into the most exhilarating adventure of his life.
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What Hacker News says
- American Gods was the least favorite of the Gaiman books I've (tried to) read. I love Neverwhere, which might be my favorite book, and Stardust is up there too, but I just couldn't get into American Gods, and have avoided Anasazi Boys because of this.
- It is for instance interesting to see Gaiman’s adaptations before and after he basically had a blank check from studios.
Stardust is… okay. Cute. I need a new Neverwhere. Even though half the reason I gave “Vigil” a shot is because it had the Marquis as the captain.
- Here is the grand total of formatting supported by RTF in use in my novels:
* headers
* italics
* maybe 2-3 instances of *bold* through the entire text.
I don't need any additional "quality of editing". Hiding the syntax is irrelevant because the needs are so limited. Hiding the user interface on the other hand, matters to me, because it's a distraction (to others it isn't). My editor color-codes the headers and the italics, and having it stand out matters far more to me than that it looks the way it will in the formatted book, because my draft looks nothing like the finished book will anyway.
If you look at interviews with writers, you'll find a whole lot of obsession over the process, and things like how it feels to write with a pen vs. a typewriter vs. a word processor, and very, very little about what their drafts look like. It's far down the list of considerations you'll find novelists care about.
Nobody cares what the drafts look like, because they are transient. In fact you'll find a whole lot of authors advocate avoiding going back and editing and arguing for things like dictaphones etc. to make going back harder or using tools that won't let scroll up in some cases to simulate the typewriter experience, and all kinds of similar obsessions with spending as little time as possible on formatting and what the manuscript looks like in preference of being able to just dump the first draft into text the fastest way possible (while other authors want writing the first draft to take longer on purpose - to some that is a reason for using pens or pencils).
You mentioned Gaiman in another reply - someone who has talked at length about how since he wrote Stardust in a fountain pen he has come to enjoy being forced to rewrite his second draft entirely instead of being able to go back and forth and editing it since he switched to writing with pen on paper.
I'm sure you can find novelists that want to see a beautifully formatted manuscript while writing it. They have tools they can use.
But to suggest Markdown is some sort of big hindrance compared to some of the barriers novelists create for themselves on purpose doesn't pass the smell test for me.
