On series and endings
Over the past couple of weeks, while most people who enjoy fantasy novels have been either re-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or diving head-first into A Dance with Dragons, I've been...finishing my Wheel of Time re-read. I never said I had a good sense of timing.
So what did I learn from my re-read? Well, I learned that I was probably justified in quitting the series after Crossroads of Twilight, because wow, that one's a stinker. I expected a certain amount of what the comic book fandom calls "writing for the trade" -- that is, an individual chapter seems slim and poorly paced if that's the only piece of the story you get for a month (or in the case of this series, two and a half years), but when you read the whole story at once, after it's completed, that particular piece doesn't bug so much. Except, in this case...it totally does. That was definitely the hardest book to get through, and even the author admitted that it didn't come out the way he wanted it to.
Knife of Dreams was better, but only by comparison. Stuff starts to happen, and a few plotlines even resolve, more or less, but it's still horribly slow.
And then Sanderson shows up. (For those who don't know, Robert Jordan passed away after book 11, and Brandon Sanderson was hired to finish the series from Jordan's outline.) Jordan said that he was only going to do one more book, and that he was going to wrap up everything, no matter how long it took. But frankly, I don't believe him. It's taking Sanderson three books instead of one, and stuff is happening at a break-neck pace now. If Jordan tried to cover the same ground at his usual speed, it would take at least five books, and that's being generous.
And I do feel really bad about saying it, because I hate to speak ill of the departed, but I'm sort left feeling that "Dude, Sanderson tells your story way better than you do. Sorry." I'm trying to think of it as kind of a co-authoring thing, where Jordan outlined the arc of the plot, and all the milestones along the way, and Sanderson is just filling in the picture. Because as far as I can tell, that's what happened. And if that's the case, it's a fantastic collaboration, because what Sanderson's doing on the small scale is making me really enjoy the series again. There are a few points where I laughed out loud, and a few others where I wanted to stand up and cheer, and both of those things have long been missing from this series. Sanderson's writing has a cinematic quality to it, where as I'm reading it, I catch myself thinking, "This will make an excellent scene in the movie," and then I remember that there actually isn't a movie, at least not yet.
If you're looking for it, you can definitely see the change in tone. Some of Jordan's more annoying pet phrases go away, and the descriptions, and even the characters' language, become somewhat more relaxed. I distinctly remember a character expressing disbelief in something by saying he "didn't buy it," which struck me as somewhat anachronistic, and not a phrase Jordan would have used. Mat, in particular, has taken a level in Snarkiness, or at least, he says out loud the snarky things that had previously been confined to the inside of his head. All the characters seem a lot more willing to communicate with each other than they have been previously, and it makes a huge difference to my enjoyment of the books.
Maybe I'm wrong, and all this amazing wrapping up and character communication was what Jordan planned from the get-go. It has been pointed out that honesty is usually rewarded in this series, often immediately, but since the characters have to go through a lot of crushing misery before getting to the end, they spend a lot of time not being honest with each other in the process. And maybe Jordan intended to change that here at the end. Regardless, Sanderson is a breath of fresh air to a series that had gotten stale, and knowing that his books were waiting at the end was the only thing that got me through the worst parts of the read-through.
Now, though, I'm excited about the series and eagerly awaiting the last book...in about eight months. Remember what I said about my sense of timing?
So what did I learn from my re-read? Well, I learned that I was probably justified in quitting the series after Crossroads of Twilight, because wow, that one's a stinker. I expected a certain amount of what the comic book fandom calls "writing for the trade" -- that is, an individual chapter seems slim and poorly paced if that's the only piece of the story you get for a month (or in the case of this series, two and a half years), but when you read the whole story at once, after it's completed, that particular piece doesn't bug so much. Except, in this case...it totally does. That was definitely the hardest book to get through, and even the author admitted that it didn't come out the way he wanted it to.
Knife of Dreams was better, but only by comparison. Stuff starts to happen, and a few plotlines even resolve, more or less, but it's still horribly slow.
And then Sanderson shows up. (For those who don't know, Robert Jordan passed away after book 11, and Brandon Sanderson was hired to finish the series from Jordan's outline.) Jordan said that he was only going to do one more book, and that he was going to wrap up everything, no matter how long it took. But frankly, I don't believe him. It's taking Sanderson three books instead of one, and stuff is happening at a break-neck pace now. If Jordan tried to cover the same ground at his usual speed, it would take at least five books, and that's being generous.
And I do feel really bad about saying it, because I hate to speak ill of the departed, but I'm sort left feeling that "Dude, Sanderson tells your story way better than you do. Sorry." I'm trying to think of it as kind of a co-authoring thing, where Jordan outlined the arc of the plot, and all the milestones along the way, and Sanderson is just filling in the picture. Because as far as I can tell, that's what happened. And if that's the case, it's a fantastic collaboration, because what Sanderson's doing on the small scale is making me really enjoy the series again. There are a few points where I laughed out loud, and a few others where I wanted to stand up and cheer, and both of those things have long been missing from this series. Sanderson's writing has a cinematic quality to it, where as I'm reading it, I catch myself thinking, "This will make an excellent scene in the movie," and then I remember that there actually isn't a movie, at least not yet.
If you're looking for it, you can definitely see the change in tone. Some of Jordan's more annoying pet phrases go away, and the descriptions, and even the characters' language, become somewhat more relaxed. I distinctly remember a character expressing disbelief in something by saying he "didn't buy it," which struck me as somewhat anachronistic, and not a phrase Jordan would have used. Mat, in particular, has taken a level in Snarkiness, or at least, he says out loud the snarky things that had previously been confined to the inside of his head. All the characters seem a lot more willing to communicate with each other than they have been previously, and it makes a huge difference to my enjoyment of the books.
Maybe I'm wrong, and all this amazing wrapping up and character communication was what Jordan planned from the get-go. It has been pointed out that honesty is usually rewarded in this series, often immediately, but since the characters have to go through a lot of crushing misery before getting to the end, they spend a lot of time not being honest with each other in the process. And maybe Jordan intended to change that here at the end. Regardless, Sanderson is a breath of fresh air to a series that had gotten stale, and knowing that his books were waiting at the end was the only thing that got me through the worst parts of the read-through.
Now, though, I'm excited about the series and eagerly awaiting the last book...in about eight months. Remember what I said about my sense of timing?