Post by gregory on Jul 31, 2007 4:24:47 GMT -5
lachryma said:
Thank you, good sir, for your very comprehensive reply! Not that you'll probably ever see this, what with you going to bed now and the many pages of spam that will show up by tomorrow, but oh well!And yeah, Robert Jordan is pretty fething annoying. Do you really need a thousand pages each book and (more then) 11 books to tell your story?
And yes, fighting against cliches will always make cool fantasy.
I wasn't going to bed, but I needed to get some work done before it *was* time for bed. As I finished what I expected to do, tonight, I thought I'd stop by one more time.
Weis and Hickman's The Death Gate Cycle (which I sincerely enjoyed) told its story and made its point in 7 books, and the 7th book was shorter than most of the others. Robert Jordan took the last 60 pages of his 6th book and rewrote it as the first 80 pages of his 7th book. That was so unforgivable a sin that I stopped reading the series. I was not encouraged by fans who said things like "nothing happens in the 7th and 8th books, but the 9th book makes it worth reading the other two." If you can spend 2,000 pages writing about nothing, I don't know why I should waste my time.
It's okay to have a few loose ends at the end of your story. You don't need to expand your series to 12 books just to make sure you leave no potential plot unused. Tolkien has a lot of problems, but one thing I've always liked about him is that he would make references to things you could tell were huge stories in themselves, but he was satisfied with leaving out the details. If you're horribly curious, you can pick up the dense material that has been published since his death.
Almost every chapter of The Simarillion could be a book unto itself, and there are some that I'd love to see as fully realized books, but the dialogue-free format makes it really difficult to get into the stories before they're over. But that's fine by me because believe he never intended for them to be published in that format. He didn't insist that The Lord of the Rings couldn't end until his characters explored the Grey Havens and told the reader all about the history of Feanor, the Simarils, and Morgoth.
In any case, now I really *should* be going to bed.