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Brandon Sanderson / Re: The Gathering Storm Chapter One
« on: September 08, 2009, 04:08:32 AM »The description of the wind is something that only happens in first chapters of Wheel of Time books. The rest of the chapters will be more character-focused.
But:QuoteEven when we finally do see the characters, they're barely there for a paragraph before it launches off into more melodramatic scenery.Surely you're exaggerating.
Erm, no...? There was perhaps the equivalent of a single paragraph of dialogue, then more shoveling in of unnecessary details, then another small bit of dialogue, then still more shoveling. If you want to count characters' inner voice, then the amount of non-descriptive text in the chapter increases by only a miniscule amount. Like I said, I love description and detail in books--I myself have quite a bit of it in the novel I'm editing--but at some point it starts getting ridiculous.
That really depends how you define "unnecessary". Things like the level of body contact between characters, their reactions and feelings to the unfolding of a conversation, etc... are all rightly intertwined with dialogue in any reasonably descriptive book. Brandon's style in previous books was light on this and conveyed these details in other ways. It's fine if you like that, but all of these details relate to character development in a series as long-spanning as Wheel of Time. We also come in on a pretty introspective chapter so it's not as if this is entirely normal- we're just being reminded about all the psychological baggage the central character has picked up recently.