A Battle at Last!
Oh, good, I wondered how many bombs I’d have to throw before we started a real debate. *grin*
First, you’re misrepresenting or misunderstood what I said. I’ve read all those authors, but not all their books—several do multiple trilogies, which obviously doesn’t fall under my definition. Admittedly, a few I haven’t read since I was a kid. (I loved all the Zelazny books, but I was 14 and don’t remember them flawlessly, plus all of the Amber books together would have had a wordcount of less than one of the monsters we’ve been talking about, so apples, meet oranges.) And of course, some of those authors may have tackled the problems successfully in series I haven’t read of theirs. I never claimed encyclopedic knowledge.
I never claimed they all had the same greatest strengths and weaknesses. That doesn’t make sense. The point was purely logical: If X is your greatest strength, and you write a novel without X, you’re writing a novel without your greatest strength.
Come on, you have to agree with that.
Not all writers are equally great at all parts of writing: Grisham does dynamite tension, but his characters aren’t deep, someone else will have the opposite strength and problem. The same applies to fantasy writers. Surely you can agree with that, too?
So, going from the fact that readers score subsequent books in really long series lower, the question is why? Either fantasy readers are vindictive and ignorant of the difficulties of the form, or “there have been stumbles,” as you put it. (In the passive voice, lest you say who stumbled.)
I don’t think the main mass of readers are vindictive. I think they know quality, and I think they read enough books to know when an author is giving them great stuff, and when they’re not. So this is where you and I stand apart from each other. You blame the form, I blame the writers.
And, since you put me on the spot, sure, I’ll say it: Robert Jordan stumbled. For multiple books. Were there reasons stumbling was easy? Yep. Did he get good things out of the tradeoffs he made by writing too many books? Sure. Is he still one of my favorite writers? Absolutely. Was his writing magical? Yes. With Robert Jordan, I could read a whole book and not realize until it was over that nothing had happened. I owe the man a huge debt, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from his mistakes.
(I didn’t post at all about magic here, so I’ll take the next post on Monday, Brandon—but I’m on the road and had to dash this off.)
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