Timewaster's Guide Archive

Here's something I found very interesting with Brandon Sanderson's latest blog post. I'm being a critic here by the way.

One of the things I went into this series wondering was if I could pick out why some readers grew frustrated with the series around books seven and eight.  I went into this book during this particular read-through expecting it to be one of the weaker ones in the series, and yet, I found it to be one of my favorites.

Well, I'll admit Crown of Swords wasn't the worst of them...

Part of me wonders if this character progression, which I find marvelously done, is part of what drove readers to complain about these later books.  If that is the case, then they are missing one of the great aspects of the series, in my opinion.  Rand is particularly heroic in how he faces so many difficult challenges, being beaten up physically and mentally, yet continues on despite it and even retains a large measure of his inner nobility. 

I point as a counterweight to these complaints that when you CAN read the entire series straight through, the viewpoints work so well together that the books become an even greater masterpiece.  The story is so complex and interconnected that you can often get your payoffs chapters and chapters away from the places where they are introduced.  But they're all the more sweet for the complexity and delicate touch.

Subjective. When you read the series straight through, you can really tell that the plot is stretched and filled with fat that needs to be cut. If ther ewas a biggest loser for books, Wheel of Time would definitely be on there. A ruthless red pen would cut down the series to an acceptable level - namely five or six books max. Then we can consider calling the series a "masterpiece".  Oh, the story is so complex that most readers get confused at who is who. It's rather tedious.



Well, in the later books the character progression slows down the plot progression which is actually the most important aspect in writing an outstanding, structured book. Without a good, fast-paced plot, the characterization is virtually useless, and just drags the books quality down. Heck, I'm 16 and I think I know more about structuring a good plot/characterization that some professional authors...

I object to complaints about pacing.  I thing the pacing across the series has been even, and I certainly didn't find this book to be any slower than previous volumes.  However, perhaps that's because I'm able to read these all through without any wait in-between.  One thing that is happening is that as the series grows longer, the viewpoints per character grow less and less frequent.  There are enough main characters with important plots that we can't spend an entire book focusing on just two or three of them like we did during the early books.

I did. It can get extremely tedious reading a lengthy scene where nothing much happens except this character talks to that one, and they have dinner together. Nothing happens. It doesn't help construct a good plot. Instead it portrays a book that could have been devised by some teenager who wants to experiment with writing and doesn't really know how to build a structured, fast-paced plot. In other words, its his "first attempt".

This series, as I've said before, is meant to be read straight through.  I think, perhaps, that waiting two years for this book and then only getting a tiny slice of the overall story might be what caused complaints from readers.  It's not that the writing quality went down (I think it goes up as the series continues) or that the pacing grew slower.  I think that the problem is readers not grasping the entire vision of the story, which is difficult to do when you don't know how many books there will be or how long it will be until they are done.

Nope. I'm reading Eye of the World to Knife of Dreams straight through. It's nothing to do with the wait inbetween each book for the majority of readers. It's the unstructured plot that really irritates readers. Take Crossroads of Twilight for example: The whole book could have been scrapped and it wouldn't affect the rest of the series. In fact, it would have been for the better. In Crossroads, the plot virtually...stopped...Basically the plot jumps from Winter's Heart to Knife of Dreams. Crossroads is a beautiful example of how NOT to write a structured plot. In fact, out of the whole fantasy genre, I think it holds the Number One Seat for how NOT to write a book. Path of Daggers and Winters Heart, and maybe Crown of Swords follows closely behind it. At least in Winter's Heart there was some sort of resolution at the end. Crossroads basically contained none of the required elements of a novel. It's the pacing that really irks readers.

As Eye of the World truly was a masterpiece, I think it will be remembered as a book that left threads for a potential master series and a turnpoint in the fantasy genre. Wheel of Time will be remembered as the series that could have outdone Tolkien and held the High Seat of all fantasy. Unfortunately, the books were streched to breaking point and as a result, this can never be now.