Treading Water in the New Millenium

[lurch]

..Yes, I've said so before, and i'll say it again..THERE IS a whole wham, bam, crash'em thing going on in Runes,,its just not physical. There is Mental violence going on,,rite from the opening paragraph.
...Unfortunately, it appears that mental violence has been characterized as " whiney" or excess groanage...I am of the thought,,that one has to "hear" the groan or indecisiveness or whine,,and think about what has caused the character to express accordingly..Okay, here it comes,,YET, ANOTHER,,META,,,PHOR!!!...Its like Linden and her coming to understanding Anele and what becomes of him when he stands on dirt or grass or rock..The Circumstances That Lead to a Behavior ...her deductive processes are a good example for the reader to follow...Try to imagine what is making her groan,,whine or be slow on the decision making process. Its my belief,,SRD is in a sense,,using Linden as an example. Again, i keep going back to that Mdm Bovary analogy. I can only suggest,,stop getting wrapped around the axle with the Linden Character. Go with the character that YOU CAN relate to. That character will probably go thru more changes than Linden.
...And,,using Liand as an example of a rather empty character...Its my view that is exactly right..he is a niaeve, almost innocent, wide eyed and full of wonderment character...Of the three main male characters,,he does fit at the end of the age curve..Liand,,Stave and Anele. Think about it...I find no fault in that.
...MEL

[Variol Farseer]

Variol, your remarks are I’m sure in general correct regarding typing vs. word processing. As for Donaldson specifically, I am under the impression that he has always been a classic overwriter. While many writers self-redact their works for tightness, I think much of the trimming of Donaldson’s prior TC books was done at the editorial level. For instance, IIRC the manuscript he submitted for The Illearth War was one and a half times as long as the published work. Del Rey cut the manuscript lavishly (as SRD had known they would have to, given the length constraints he ignored).

Actually, it was SRD himself who cut TIW, as he described in the introduction to Daughter of Regals. Del Rey just told him how much they wanted him to cut. There are some real horror stories about editors doing this. One well-known author was told to cut 30 pages from a book — 'any 30 pages'. His editor literally didn't care what he removed.

It must have been rather like the scene from Nickelodeon where Ryan O'Neal is directing a silent film in a sweatshop studio, and his boss comes along to chew him out for being a day behind schedule. 'How many pages is that?' O'Neal asks.

'Five,' says the boss.

O'Neal takes the script, counts off five pages from the scene he's now shooting, and tears them out of the binder. 'There. Now I'm on time.'

With my aforementioned 300,000-word monster, my editor did not even tell me how much to cut. When I tried to pin him down even to a rough percentage, he said: 'I'm not going to do your job for you.'

I think there’s been a shift (that I’ve noticed particularly in sf / fantasy) over the past generation toward a much lighter editorial hand, which is not always for the better. I attribute the motivation for this to be cost cutting.

I sometimes wonder if there is any other motivation in publishing now.

But you're right: and the problem is that editors don't have time to edit. It's routine for an editor to be responsible for putting out three books per month; I've heard of at least one editor who has to publish 100 books per year. Yes, that's an editor, not a publisher. The company in question has other editors on staff. Clearly, you can't do any meaningful amount of editing on a book in two or three days' work.

If the authors themselves supplied the missing editorial hand, putting their own work in tip-top shape before submitting it, this wouldn't matter so much. But most authors don't have the skill or the emotional detachment to do that.

BTW, is your book published?

Not yet. By the time it is, it may be unrecognizable. The aforementioned editor is talking about cutting it further, or splitting it into two books, or possibly even both; and even at that, he's not sure he can afford to buy it, because the publisher that employs him seems to have gone heavily over budget on some other books.

You could say that I'm about as far along in the process as SRD was in 1976. That's not to say that my stuff is in any way comparable to his; I refer only to the business of dealing with publishers.

[Variol Farseer]

In a way you're right about the editing part. I have a feeling that with an old typewriter you would be more reluctant to rewrite whole pages of manuscripts so what we see in early books is pretty much how it was played out in his mind while writing it. The word processor gives us freedom to instantly change, go back, erase and move and thereby maybe losing the flow of thought.

I do not however blame the uber-eloquence of "Runes" on the word processor. I write myself and I pretty much write everything in one sitting and then scroll back to fix mistakes in spelling and grammar. I very rarely change context or phrasing. It is my guess that most writers work like that, otherwise you would go insane and never get anything done.

Actually, I meant it the other way round. When you have to re-type everything by hand, that forces you to reconsider every word. So you don't go back and tinker, tinker, tinker with copy; but since you have to do some revision, if only to produce a clean manuscript with no XXXX's or whiteout on it, you do have to retype the whole thing at least once. That means that every word has at least a moment of editorial scrutiny.

For every word a writer stops to ponder and change around, "fix up" and make more elegant, every single one of his reader will stop at the same place as well when reading it. It's all in the flow...

I believe you're seriously mistaken about this. P.G. Wodehouse used to stop, ponder, change, fix, every single word in his stories — usually multiple times. They say he used to write first drafts on a special typewriter with a roll feeder, so he wouldn't have to stop to insert fresh pages. At the end of the day he would cut the roll into page-sized chunks and pin them to the wall, row on row. If a page seemed to slow down the pace of the story, he would hang it a little lower than the rest. If the prose or the actual story elements needed fixing, he would hang it crooked. Once the first draft was done, he would go back and rewrite each page, over and over and over, until they were all hanging straight and level.

I don't know if this story is true, but it certainly represents the kind of meticulous revision that Wodehouse used to do — and most writers don't do anymore. Yet there is never a point in a Wodehouse book where you stop reading; never a point where you question what the author is doing, or where you can see that editing was done. It was his obsessive, perfectionist, word-by-word revision that created the flow.

I think cutting TIW taught SRD a lot about narrative pacing, by the way. There were long passages in LFB that I skimmed or skipped the first time I read it; but not in any of the other books. The exercise of cutting a book that drastically developed his writing muscles in ways that nothing else could have done. Unfortunately, with Runes he seems to have gone a bit flabby in spots.

[Skeletal Grace]

Variol wrote:

That means that every word has at least a moment of editorial scrutiny.

I would assume every writer reads through his manuscript at least once anyway with the intention to edit the occasional word here and there, not to stop himself at every possible discourse-crossroad, questioning his original choice of words. Maybe it's just me? It just seems like a very time consuming and detached way of writing.



Variol also wrote (on my thoughts on over-scrutinizing your own words and losing the flow in the process):

I believe you're seriously mistaken about this.

Mistaken or not... I can't presume to speak for Wodehouse of course. Being a writer myself, certainly no Donaldson or Wodehouse - just an amateur hack, I can only speak for myself. I write everything in one big block and then only go back to cut out unnecessary parts and change grammar and spelling.

I type very fast and pretty much just type what I think. If I have to slow down either my typing or my thinking to ponder phrasing and wording, my train of thought will inevitably derail and I'm screwed. Once I am done with a page I can't go back and fix the way it's written without losing the flow I originally had.
If I go back and read it and don't approve, it was my flow of thought that was wrong, not the words I chose. In effect, this means that I write a whole lot more than I need to and then basically go back and just happily cut out the surplus.

I just assumed everybody wrote like that. I never realized some writers make it a science to fidget around with what goes where, exchanging one word for another because it looks nicer. Then again... I was always more concerned about the context and the flow than the actual language. If that works for you, more power to you.

(I'm not a published writer so I am probably just talking out of my ass anyway. HAHAHA)

I guess, much like painters and musicians, we all have very different approaches to our arts and the way we perform them.

My original concern was that I feel that Stephen Donaldson's writing, a favorite writer of mine mind you, has lost his flow. The eloquent words that once melted into golden sentences in the eye of the beholder now stand out like cold sores, damaging the context and working against the story.

There is no rhythm in Runes... None of the undercurrent that carried you through the two first chronicles, despite the rather advanced repertoire of "fancy" words already frequently used in those books

It's the flow that has changed and the question is why...

If you are right, and Mr. Donaldson writes like Wodehouse, scrutinizing words and wrecking his brain over and over to find the perfect ones, we will have to assume he always wrote that way and that the fault then lies in the editing. Does he do his own editing? He either needs to get one or fire one.

Established writers have looser reins from their publishers' editors than a writer in the beginning of his career. Note how a guy like Stephen King gets whatever crap he can conjure up published with absolutely horrible editing. He has gone from good to bad to worse, and it is not because his writing skills have diminished over the years, he just doesn't get edited the way he used to be in the beginning.
With right of fame and fortune he abuses his artistic license to fight off the evil editors and get things published the way he wants, losing his original "touch" in the euphoria of absolute power. The Dark Tower series is a perfect example of how you can drop the ball when your editor is not up your ass telling you to get to the goddamn point. The first three books were his best work ever, the following four books going downhill faster than a shithouse in a mudslide.

A good editor plays the same part a producer plays in a recording studio. The record producer delivers input and advise and has final say on what ultimately goes on the tape. When the musicians eventually become rockstars they become so full of themselves and believe themselves to be invincible and all-knowing so they order the producer around, if they even enlist one, and you end up with bands like Metallica, remembering how great they once were while listening to the garbage they just released.

Same thing with writers and editors. I guess the trick is to establish a give and take relationship with a good editor you trust with your life work.

Variol... I think we are on the same page but that we just approached it from different angles.

- - -

See... I just wrote another War & Peace. Should I go back and edit and cut half out? Nah... I have to run, so you're stuck with it. HAHAHAHA.

[Variol Farseer]

I just assumed everybody wrote like that. I never realized some writers make it a science to fidget around with what goes where, exchanging one word for another because it looks nicer. Then again... I was always more concerned about the context and the flow than the actual language. If that works for you, more power to you.

Some professionals in the business claim that there's no such thing as writing, only rewriting. That's hyperbole, of course, and I don't subscribe to it on any level. I tend towards the opposite camp: finish what you write, then leave it alone until an editor tells you to change it. But I'm definitely in the minority on that.

I do think however, that much like painters and musicians, we all have very different approaches to our arts and the way we perform them.

Exactly!

The thing is, a reader can't tell which way the work was done. And readers who think they can tell are usually fooling themselves. Here's Robert A. Heinlein in Expanded Universe:

Many people have said that STRANGER was written in two parts; the division point showed. But no two people have ever picked the same putative division point . . . and this is the first time I have ever admitted that it was not written in two chunks but in four.

No one ever will spot the actual starts and stops because STRANGER is one of the very few stories in which I plotted every detail before writing it, and then stuck precisely to that plot. What readers pick as places where I "must have" broken the writing are in fact division points planned for dramatic reasons.

Now, with bad writers it's different. If a bad writer stumbles over the editing process, fiddling with words to no good purpose, it's likely to show. It's the good writers who know how to cover their own tracks.

My original concern was that I feel that Stephen Donaldson's writing, a favorite writer of mine mind you, has lost his flow. The eloquent words that once melted into golden sentences in the eye of the beholder now stand out like cold sores, damaging the context and working against the story.

I agree, though I wouldn't put it that strongly.

If you are right, and Mr. Donaldson writes like Wodehouse, scrutinizing words and wrecking his brain over and over to find the perfect ones, we will have to assume he always wrote that way and that the fault then lies in the editing. Does he do his own editing? He either needs to get one or fire one.

Well, he got an editor for Runes, and has mentioned somewhere or other that he is no longer working with her. The pity is that few authors have any say in choosing their editors. (There's Robert Jordan, whose editor is also his wife, but Robert Jordan is not like mortal man.)

Established writers have looser reins from their publishers' editors than a writer in the beginning of his career. Note how a guy like Stephen King gets whatever crap he can conjure up published with absolutely horrible editing. He has gone from good to bad to worse, and it is not because his writing skills have diminished over the years, he just doesn't get edited the way he used to be in the beginning.

This is true. Unfortunately, it's not what happened with Runes. At Elohimfest and elsewhere, SRD has made it clear that Runes was edited with a pretty heavy hand. But his editor at Putnam was not familiar with the first six Covenant books, or with SRD as a writer, and doesn't really seem to have understood what he was on about. Also, she seems to have had a touch of the arrogance that is sadly common in editors and critics: assuming that the vast bulk of the reading public is less intelligent and educated than herself, and wanting authors to 'dumb down' their works. Now, of all modern fantasy authors, I would probably pick SRD as the one least able to be dumbed down. Yet the Covenant books have sold millions upon millions of copies, and have never been out of print since 1977. Somebody's underestimating us readers, I think.

In the end, it seems, the editing process turned into a power struggle, with the editor issuing orders whose consequences she didn't fully understand, and SRD stubbornly trying to resist — and all was done in an extreme hurry. Runes was edited, and it was edited plenty. It just wasn't edited constructively.

[yoursovain]

Thaal - yeah, this whole three years a book structure is potentially dangerous - nothing like tighter deadlines to create tighter works - SRD isn't that feeble - is he?

On this point, it unfortunately won't be until Fatal revenant until we might know how just much of Runes' structure/feel is deliberate and how much it is just how SRD writes nowadays. If it remains as 'Linden's book' it will more than satisfy me - though not the seeming legion of Linden bashers.

Duchess of Malfi - great post on Linden's struggle - shows a lot of compassion and understanding of the profound and early damage to her will.

Lurch - good to see another with compassion for Linden and the more cerebral cast of Runes - the shift you identified from physical/epic adventure/violence to mental violence is very helpful in my understanding of runes.

[Skeletal Grace]

Variol wrote:

There's Robert Jordan, whose editor is also his wife, but Robert Jordan is not like mortal man.

I was actually going to use Robert Jordan as an example first of someone who needs to be heavily edited. Now that I find out the editor is his wife it all makes sense.

Can you say "wordy"? We're going on book, what... eleven now, right? Still no ending in sight... Just angry women yanking their braids and wool headed men who don't know their place. I gave up on that series... I can only take so much of the same stuff being chewed over and over and over and... Zzzz...

Thanks for the info on SRD's editor on Runes. It doesn't make any sense to me to enlist an editor who is not familiar with an author's previous work and style when working on a sequel to those books, but that is on the publisher's head. No shadow on SRD for that one...

How much say does an author have about the final draft? I would think that SRD, having been given a nice 36 months per book, is established enough with his publisher to demand a do-over. No?

I remember when the first chronicles came out in Sweden, they were translated by three different guys. One for each book in the series (I guess they were pressed for time) and it was like reading books by three different authors.

Editors and translators on power trips can make or break any author in general, and certain books in particular.

Let's hope SRD puts his foot down and calls for a more suitable editor for the next installment. (Let's hope he even cares to...)

Let's hope he kills off Linden while he's at it...

[yoursovain]

Thaal - come on - Runes is hardly just 500 pages of struggle to get old stave to be more flexible. If it is centrally about any one thing it is about the many stories and tellers trying to make some meaning in a world where meaning is literally being eaten away or at best hidden - hence the talking heads aspect. The first chrons had tradition under assault. the second chrons had tradition destroyed with false tradition (clave etc). This chrons has tradition itself, all stories all but gone with chattering fragments left - like Jeremiah's lego set! No accident that the one ancient point of perspective over all the land (Kev's Watch) is reduced to rubble at the outset of runes.

In line with the above, this is hardly some cod boomer hippy stuff - it is nasty post-structuralist existential collapse - IMHO of course!

[danlo]

Thaale, some of your points are well taken. But if your read as fast as you type I'd suggest you slow down and read the book again. Everyone's entitled to differing opinions, in fact, e.g.: aside from the detailed description showing us exactly why Terisa was the way she was--I enjoyed the Gap for precisely the opposite reasons you state. I have been in SRD's presence when he talked about the unrealistic deadlines, editing and ardous tour schedule presented to him by Putnam. Which actually was lighter than the absolutely horrid pressures put on him by Bantam/Spectra while writing the Gap Sequence (who as my favorite Sci-Fi author, David Zindell won't tell you (since they COMPLETELY screwed him over) is the heartless beast from hell).

I feel you rush to judgement and, even I (the snail reader), need to try Runes again, but at a different pace.

[Kenaustin Ardenol]

But if your read as fast as you type I'd suggest you slow down and read the book again.

I agree with Danlo, anyone who finds this book lacking needs to read it again. Their is so much in this book it requires a second reading and even then theirs more, anyone that says nothing happens hasn't really "READ" the book. I love the first and second chronicles but they are childrens books by comparison to Runes. There is no doubt Donaldson has grown in his skill as a writer and also know doubt that those that don't see it haven't grown. THis is still the same story its not some cash in sequel. Its an ending. And so far it is glorious, I think I'll read it again for a third time even slower so I can understand even more.

[Skeletal Grace]

Knock yourself out...

I got it alright, I just didn't like it. I thought it was lacking and I find Donaldson's writing/storytelling skills worsened by either poor editing or delusions of grandeur.

"Runes" to me is the disappointing bastard child of a sketchy summary of previous events and a weak setup for the real story, hopefully beginning any time soon.

It all felt very watered down, like a cup of Floridian coffee after having had Espresso in Italy all your life. A fancy cup won't change that...