Getting Away With It

I never read the whole Robert Jordan series. And, while this may not preclude others from berating me with, “Your not a real fantasy fan” hate mail, it doesn’t mean that I don’t respect what he meant to the fantasy genre as a whole. I have read parts of his series, hell I got the first novel in his “Wheel of time” epic FREE from a bookstore that was trying to promote his third novel. But what nags me about Robert Jordan was that languid, buildup style. You know the one, where it takes FOREVER to get to the point, but once you get to the point, it’s a GREAT point.

Sure, the first time you glossed over that kind of style, a la Tad Williams, it seemed like an immersive world … but after the 10th novel of that kind, it does seem to run a tad bit overdone. So, in memory of the late James Oliver Rigney, Jr., I picked up my old copy of “The Eye of the World,” in hopes of recapturing that old magic that, I confess, I had when I gave his world a try the first time around.

To fully express my experience, let me set the stage. There’s a term in the film industry that a friend shared with me once, telling me about the word, “Shoe Leather.” In this, it refers to the times when the camera will show a character walking into a scene, with no real dialogue, for a couple of seconds. The purpose, as my friend aptly explained, was to make running time flexible, so if they were short or long they could cut and add these scenes appropriately.

This is when I realized, especially with the fledgling authors of fantasy who sparked a legion of fantasy fans, that some of these authors were sooooooo long winded. I mean sure, lets get to know the world, but COME ON, I don’t need to know every freeking facet of the world.

Back in 2005 I bought L.E. Modesitt Jr.’s “The Wellspring of Chaos”. For those who aren’t aware of LEM, he is the KING of child-hero fantasy, and also shoe leather extraordinaire! His novels are the type of novels that are the staple (even over LOTR) in middle-school’s collection of fantasy novels. So, in this novel, which I foolishly bought in hardcover, the WHOLE novel is about one thing … and that’s KILLING TIME! Reading LEM was always a guilty pleasure of mine, but this novel went too far. This was literally a book of the main character going from port to port and trying different types of fowl, then at the end killing a wizard.

Maybe it’s just me, but like many creative aspects of our society, reader’s tastes have changed. I just can’t get through those longwinded dialogues anymore, or the blatant chapters in books where it’s ONLY info dumping. Not that I’m saying I could do better, but COME ON! Gives us a bone here! Gone with the Wind, however a classic, isn’t the type of acting we want in our modern day movie stars. Happy-go-lucky superheroes aren’t the type people will relate to in today’s information-driven society.

Yet .. I’m still hesitant to pull the trigger on these long-winded type of books … because the payoff is so good. When I picked up George R.R. Martin’s first novel for the first time, I only got past the first 20 pages then put the book down. It was only months later, when I gave the book another chance, that I got past the infodumping and fell in love with his prose and style, and, for the first time in years, end up actually being surprised by what his fantasy characters did.

Can epic fantasy still be “epic” even without the longwinded tangled web of buildup? Is there a line between epic fantasy and just another D&D novel? Maybe time has unraveled the cobwebs and facades, blown past all the word counts and leaflets and truly faced us in the mirror and revealed epic fantasy for what it really was. Perhaps fantasy was truly a one hit wonder and that these days, with the flouring information superhighway, mythology based stories are a thing of the past.

Perhaps we, as fantasy authors and fans, were just getting away with it – that all fantasy has to follow a certain pattern or else no one will buy into it. Here’s hoping someone comes out of the woodwork with that wild style, and then we can finally stand up and say, this is how new-age fantasy should be written.