Kevin's Watch

Okay, so I'm rereading the 1st two trilogies. I'm half-way through The Power that Preserves, and I'm thinking, "This is not nearly as good as the first two."

I've got to admit, I'm getting sick of hearing people say, "Oh, Revelstone! Oh, you poor rock!" People are dying, and you've got some mourning a gate. Come on. Hey, forget the fact that if the gate is breached, everyone will die. No, we're supposed to feel sympathy for the fact that the rock itself will be broken (and conveniently forget that much of this rock had to be carved away and destroyed in order to make Revelstone in the first place). Yeah, I know, it's symbolic; the earth = life, yadda yadda. It was charming and otherworldly when Trell "healed" the broken stoneware in LFB. But then, no one's life was at stake.

However, that's a minor gripe. The entire scope of the 3rd book just doesn't seem as epic as the first two. There are no Quests, there is no great war, no seeking lost, mysterious Power. There's just Covenant running around in the snow and Mhoram grimly staring at green lights in the ground. (Yeah, I know I'm simplifying it.)

I guess the reason this bugs me so much is because people have complained that Runes is not as good as the "originals." In my opinion, Runes was infinitely more entertaining than PTP. And the writing is orders of magnitude better.

Has anyone else noticed how often SDR, in his early years, makes use of "as if . . .", "like a . . . ", and "seemed . . ."?? Why must every sentence be a simile? Can't he show the depth and power of what's happening without comparing it to something else? If the events/actions aren't potent enough speak for themselves, no amount of comparing them to unrelated, often confusing images are going to make them more powerful. In his more recent writing (Gap, Runes), he relies upon this overused technique much less.

(p.243) "[Mhoram] raised his staff AS IF to ward off a nightmare." Why can't he be raising his staff to to ward off the very real threat of the green moon that has been poisoned by LF as a signal for Satansfist to begin his next attack? Why compare this literal, significant threat to an insignificant, unreal nightmare? How does that make it more powerful?

(p.243) "LIKE a tsunami of malignant scorn, [the green moonlight] rolled upward and broke across the Keep." I have a hard time picturing a tsunami composed of malignant scorn. What's that look like?

(p.243) "Its green, radiant swath swept LIKE a blaze of wrong over the ground . . . " Yeah, a blaze of wrong. I know exactly what that's like. So let me get this straight: the green light is like BOTH a blaze AND a tsunami? It's a blazing tsunami of wrong malignant scorn? What?

(p.243) "Slowly, Mhoram realized he was grimacing LIKE a cornered madman . . . the contortion clung to his face LIKE the grin of a skull." So he's like a cornered, dead madman?

And there are many more on that one page I picked at random. There is literally NO paragraph on that page (and most other pages) that is free of this impossible-to-imagine, often conflicting imagery. How about "reanimated lust"? Any clue what that looks like?

Don't get me wrong, I love SRD's writing. I devour his books like a cornered tsunami of blazing, reanimated lust of a madman. It's just that he's so good at coming up with these comparisons, that they seemed to come too easily for him, and I think that by his 3rd book, he was getting lazy with his overuse of such language.

Just my opinion. What do you all think?

Wait till you get to The Healer then TPTP will rock your world!

I always have to be in the mood for donaldson, the one where I can read without analysis. I do all the analysis later when I'm not faced with the ACTUAL cumbersome language. But I love it all the same!

Wait till you get to The Healer then TPTP will rock your world!

Yeah, I read it long ago, and I remember it rocking my world, so I'm expecting it to get better.

And I know SRD says that he is not a visual writer, so perhaps I'm expecting to much to be able to visualize a tsunami of malignant scorn. However, HE is the one saying that this green light is LIKE a scornful tsunami. So if A is like B, and this comparison is supposed to elucidate A, then shouldn't I know what B is like in the first place? If A is like B, then mustn't B already exist independently of A in order for me to compare the two?

I think if he just said A is B--a metaphor rather than a simile--I could stomach it much better. I would no longer have to know what a scornful tsunami is like in order to make sense of the comparison; he would be defining a scornful tsunami in these terms, "calling it into being," so to speak.

Yes, this is a small distinction, but one that is important in my own writing, so I'm sensitive to it. I like to use metaphors in such a way that what I'm saying is both literal and figurative at the same time, on two different levels, so that the comparison is not merely a fanciful phrase, but the literal truth. Since scornful tsunamis don't actually exist, there is no way this can make sense as a comparison between A and B.

Am I being too picky?

Malik23,

Like so many other things Donaldson, his use of simile can either move you or annoy you. You're not the first mention the issue, it's been mentioned many times. (I'm not sure if/when it has come up at the Watch, though.)

This critique comes to mind:
» Monstrous Regiment: Sauron, Torak and Lord Foul
In which was written

"With a howl that shivered the air, echoed savagely off the carven walls, beat against the battlements like an ululation of fangs and claws and hungry blades..."

I beg your pardon? If somebody knows how to make a sharp object ‘ululate,’ let me know. This is plain word misuse and it drives me nuts.

... It gives the sense that you are reading a Van Gogh.

Personally, I like the very things you seem to dislike. And I don't try to imagine what a 'tsunami of malignant scorn' looks like. It's non-literal imagery. What I can do is imagine that green light crawling up the walls, and imagine how it must look if someone can compare it to a 'tsunami of malignant scorn'.

Is every single simile a gem? No, of course not. But I don't mind looking over several dozen dusty, mishappen stones before I find one.

SRD's similes are hit and miss. The real misses (that ululation of fangs is one, definitely) are fairly rare, and therefore stand out in contrast to all the solid hits. If the misses outnumbered the hits, you wouldn't notice any one of them so much . . . but you'd find the whole thing extremely tiresome to read, and throw the book against the wall, and go look for something written by an author with an actual command of the English language.

(Some people have actually had that reaction to SRD, but judging from the ones I've known best, I'd say it was their command of the language that was at fault, rather than his.)

I've become particularly aware of this difficulty in my own work, partly because I have a first-person narrator who naturally describes things in terms of far-fetched similes, but also because I have the difficult job of writing in fairly colloquial language without using any current cliches. Sherwood Smith, who has been a prop in my weariness and a consolation in my times of despair, says the trouble is that I use cliches so rarely, each individual one stands out like a sour note in a Santana concert. I believe it is much the same with SRD's failed similes.

In his brilliant A Reader's Manifesto, B.R. Myers derides the reviewers who admit that a book has a silly plot, cardboard characters, a cloudy theme, and slipshod narrative and dialogue, but praise it to the skies because it contains brilliant sentences. (Not all the sentences; just the occasional lonely jewel.) Part of this is because reviewers must find something to praise, or lose advertising revenue, which is hard enough to come by. But part, I think, is that we naturally notice the rare and exceptional more than the ordinary. What a relief, to find one bright and lucid turn of phrase in a wretched slag-heap of a novel! And what a disappointment, to find ululating fangs interrupting the rich stream of Donaldson's prose!

(**Variol Farseer continues**)

... It gives the sense that you are reading a Van Gogh.

Speaking of that, and of B.R. Myers — well, there are worse things than reading a Van Gogh:

B.R. Myers wrote:On the second page of The Shipping News [Annie] Proulx introduces the central character as a man with a body like a loaf of bread, a head like a melon, facial features like fingertips, eyes the color of plastic and a chin like a shelf. The reader is left trying to care about a walking Arcimboldo painting.

With respect to Tehanu, for sheer inappropriate awfulness in the context given, Arcimboldo trumps Van Gogh and takes every trick.

And this is supposed to be a literary novel, and was praised to the skies by critics for its prose style, not in spite of it.

It's not that bad writing is 'good enough for fantasy'; it's that the art of good writing has been completely forgotten by the people in charge of the Old Baloney Factory. It is a commonplace in publishing today that editors don't edit: they're assigned so much scutwork that they don't have time to do their actual job. What is overlooked is that a lot of editors wouldn't have the skills to edit if they tried. They haven't the training, and their natural taste has been revolted and debauched by the tons and tons of maggoty tripe they push through the mill every year.

I wish I were making this up.

Where does the "ululation of fangs" quote come from?

Funny - TPTP has had far the strongest emotional impact on me from the first trilogy. Covenant's painful struggle through the Land, the eating of amanibhavam, the encounter with Lena, Foamfollower's death and rebirth etc. Brilliant.

As for his use of language - he is a painter, really. And an impressionist at that. Hepaints with his words. Often they are just blotches of colour, put together seemingly at random, but if you step back you will see the picture.

And he is like Hile Troy. He does not see pictures in his head, so he sees through his words.

I've become particularly aware of this difficulty in my own work, partly because I have a first-person narrator who naturally describes things in terms of far-fetched similes, but also because I have the difficult job of writing in fairly colloquial language without using any current cliches.

Fascinating. I'm also writing in first person (which I've heard SDR abhors). I find it very difficult to plausibly use creative similes because, well, my main character is not a writer. How many people walk around interpretting their world in terms of unique, well-written similes? First person is definitely a challenge. It limits how much exposition you can give, because--again--who walks around thinking in chunks of exposition? I've wrestled with this so much that I've even dabbled at making my fantasy novel stream-of-consciousness. That was a horrible idea, but it jump-started my revision process to produce some interesting results.

I've considered going back to third person narrative, but the themes of my book really do necessitate a first person perspective, since I'm traversing existential territory. It has to be his experience, or it's inauthentic. In addition, I take my (theoretical) readers through different states of consciousness. So 1st person is a necessity.

dlbpharmd wrote:Where does the "ululation of fangs" quote come from?

Just a few paragraphs into "Lord Mhoram's Victory", I believe.

amanibhavam wrote:Funny - TPTP has had far the strongest emotional impact on me from the first trilogy.

I agree. TIW is my favourite, but TPTP is emotionally the most intense for me.

I like SRD's similies. As has been said, they don't all work, but then he's human. Things like the tsunami of malignant scorn don't bother me because, like Wayfriend, I don't try to visualise it. To me, such sentences are expressions of emotion rather than visual images.

Malik23 wrote:I'm also writing in first person (which I've heard SDR abhors).

The mysteries are written in the first person, so he can't abhor it that much.