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I am so relieved to read this. It certainly justifies the fact that I did not waste any money on schoolin to help me learn to write.

Hey it worked for Bert Facey

Neither did Mark Twain, and look how he turned out. Some of us with lesser abilities find schooling in writing helpful, as a pointer to methods that often work well, and to others that generally flop.

Twain himself wrote that "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightening and the lightening-bug." (That was in "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses", one of the most devastating, and hilarious, negative reviews of a work of fiction I have ever read. I highly recommend it. {see http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_fenimore.html})

Hey, Don this link didn't work for me - it just went to the general pbs website. And I was too lazy to search any further. I am interested in reading it, since, when I write, I occasionally aspire to be like Twain (Mark, not Shania).

It probably has the same content as this

http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html

Thanks, Alef, I just read it. And . . .

Wow. Talk about a negative review. I'm pretty sure I do not want Mr. Twain commenting on any of MY stories. Lucky for me he is not into spanking. Plus, he is quite dead.

This is the most scathing, vicious, and funny[b][/b] review I can ever remember reading. Twain criticizes every aspect of Cooper's writing, especially his inconsistencies of character and description. Yet some of his sarcastic lines are simply laugh out loud funny.

It did have the effect of making me want to read The Deerslayer (which I somehow managed to avoid reading in my long gone school days) just to see if Mr. Clemens was on target, or if he just had it in for JF Cooper - maybe he stole his real-life Becky Thatcher, or something. (certainly, Twain would point out this inconsistency in my theory, since Cooper died just 16 years after Twain was born, and would likely have been too old to steal anything of Twain's. I point this out just in case ole Mark is reading this from the afterlife, and thinking of commenting on how bad a writer I am for suggesting it).

I know Twain became a somewhat bitter, disgruntled man towards the end of his life, but - even if this review is accurate - it seems a bit like piling on.

And DonL, I didn't see the quote about the lightning and the lightning bug in Twain's review. The closest thing I saw was Twain saying writers should use the right word, not its second cousin (which is pretty clever too). I Googled Twain quotes, and Mr. Google indicates Twain said the lightning bug quote in a letter to George Baines (not in the Cooper review). For this error, Mark Twain sentences you to read all of Cooper's works, and find the one instance when he actually does use the right word. Good luck.

If you want to read more about a fictional version of Twain I recommend Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, although Twain, known in books by his real name of Samuel Clemens, so generally referred to as Sam, doesn't appear until the second book of the series: The Fabulous Riverboat. The first in the series To Their Scattered Bodies Go focusses more on Sir Richard Burton the explorer another fascinating man.

I'm glad you brought that up, SeeGee. I read the first of the River World series when it first came out. Found it marvelously inventive and interesting. Loved it, and could not wait for the next installment. The second book, I thought, was not so good, but I figured that it would get better with the next. Nope, for me at least, it was worse still. My impression was that Farmer had this great idea for a setting for a book, the River World, but then once he had it fully established, he had no good idea what to do with it.
Might just be me; I had the same feeling about the whole Dune line of books.

The Riverworld series has many good things in it, but in my view the fictional version of Twin is not one of them -- it is too far divorced from the actual Twain/Clemens, and sounds to much like a 20th C man, not the 19th C Clemens. (I have much the same problem with Horatio Hornblower, who is a 1940s man in a 1790s-1820s world, in my view.)

Although the thread seems to have changed in a quite interesting discussion of Twain venomous article on Cooper's works and Farmer's Riverworld series, I will return momentarily to the use of repeating onomatopoeic words trying to convey the spanking sounds blow by blow. I also prefer the second option as described by DLandhill. I am reasonably sure that a reader will skip over most of the repeating words to get quicker to the after spanking description. I remember a quite prolific spanking author (I won't name him) that wrote pages and pages of "slap, spank and crack". If you took away those words, a four page story will yield a half a page of plot. Without entering into the merit of wrong or right, I prefer cleaner prose that will describe exactly the same scene. In my opinion, even a quite good spanking movie can become boring if the same bottom is spanked the same way from sunrise to sunset.