{"id":49,"date":"2007-09-11T10:53:41","date_gmt":"2007-09-11T18:53:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aidanmoher.com\/blog\/?p=49"},"modified":"2007-09-12T14:24:42","modified_gmt":"2007-09-12T22:24:42","slug":"article-the-multi-volume-telling-of-a-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanmoher.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/articles\/article-the-multi-volume-telling-of-a-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Article | The (multi-volume) Telling of a Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"LastA little over a week ago one of my favourite new authors, Joe Abercrombie<\/a> wrote an interesting (and wonderfully long) blog post<\/a> about the trend in the current SF\/F markets towards long, drawn out multi-volume stories that seem to lose focus as they trundle ever on *coughrobertjordancough*. Not surprisingly, the ever charming and devilishly clever Mr. Abercrombie managed to get people talking about this very subject. Starting in the Comments section of his blog and eventually making its way to the Westeros Boards<\/a> (thanks to Adam of The Wertzone<\/a> and… well, I just couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be left out!
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\nMy opinion of it is summed up pretty well by twistedsheets10<\/strong> (Comments<\/a>) who says, “For me, the length of the book\/series doesn’t really matter all that much. So long as the books have good plots, characters, etc., I’m willing to go through all 12 volumes.”<\/em> Really I too think that this is most important of all factors: if the novels continue in quality then I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m willing to give the story as much time as needed.” nazfyratu<\/strong> (Westeros<\/a>) has a slightly more innuendo filled take on the topic, “As with most things, I’d say that length doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with quality, per se. I’ve seen some long series that suck, and some that don’t. Similary, I’ve seen some short series that suck, and some that don’t. It’s not how big it is…. it’s… erm… what you do with it.”<\/em><\/p>\n

\"HarryA perfect example of this is George R.R. Martin<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s A Song of Ice and Fire<\/strong>. I feel a little guilty brining this series up (it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bit of a safe fallback when arguing about the quality of epic fantasy being produced today), but in the end it really comes down to the fact that George has already given us roughly 3.5-4k pages of a story (bringing us only a little past the halfway mark) and yet, with thousands of pages left ahead of me, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m already feeling depressed knowing that at some point the series is going to come to an end. I felt the same way when I read the final Harry Potter<\/strong> novel (spoiler-free review HERE<\/a>), I loved the characters, the world, the struggles taking place, that the series coming to an end (even after so long) was a very bittersweet moment for me.<\/p>\n

One author that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m anticipating will give me this same feeling is Patrick Rothfuss<\/a>, author of The Name of the Wind<\/strong> (review HERE<\/a>) and constant figure here on A Dribble of Ink<\/strong>. The thing that so intrigues me about his trilogy is that it was originally written as a single novel… albeit an incredibly long novel. The terrific thing about this is that we can pretty much guarantee that the quality of the remaining two novels will stay consistent with the first. But… the first novel is a good 600 pages long! Multiply that by 3 (per each volume in the trilogy) and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re looking at a whopping 1800 page novel! It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no wonder that Pat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s publisher decided to split the novel up into three. Adam (again of Wertzone fame) tackles this issue, along with another of the novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pitfalls (the lack of a real ending) in Joe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s comments<\/a>, “The Kingkiller Chronicle (originally called A Song of Flame and Thunder) was written as one work and chopped in three for publication. However, I’m not sure if this is much of an excuse: Tolkien knew in post-war, cash-strapped 1949 when he finished LotR that no-one was going to publish a 1,000-page novel in one volume as it would be too expensive, and Rothfuss knew in 2005 or whenever he finished that no-one was going to publish a 2,500-odd-page novel in one volume either. The Name of the Wind’s total absence of any kind of ending, not even a cliffhanger, is the book’s weakest feature. It just stops and presumably The Wise Man’s Fear will just start again with no preamble.”<\/p>\n

\"Wizard'sThese long novels\/trilogies\/series are great… if that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re looking for. Martin and Rowling, however, seem to be exceptions as far as big, multi-volume series go. On the other end of the spectrum are author like Terry Goodkind<\/a> and Robert Jordan<\/a>. I LOVED<\/strong> Goodkind\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s novels in highschool. I devoured them at a ravenous pace… until he released The Pillars of Creation<\/strong> and all of a sudden it seemed like Terry realized just how popular his series was (though… let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s be honest. Terry knew<\/em> his series was going to the best thing ever created) and decided it would be the perfect avenue for preaching his beliefs. If I wanted a rambling anti-socialist rant I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d read Ayn Ran. Goodkind managed to turn me from a must-buy-on-release-day fan to a I-still-haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t-read-the-latest-novel fan.<\/p>\n

\"TheJordan led me along a similar, though less violently offensive road. I read and greatly enjoyed his novels, but it seemed to me that after the third novel that Jordan started to fall too<\/em> deeply in love with his own creation. Of course and author being in love with their novel and the story they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re telling is important, but there is a line that can be crossed. In later novels (I will admit to only having read up to and including The Crown of Swords<\/strong>) it seems that Jordan spent crammed all the story into the last 100-150 pages of the novels, creating terrific endings to his novels, but requiring a lot of work to get to the good stuff. Each novel moves the overall storyline forward on a small amount but manage to leave the reader with a vast knowledge of the current fashion trends of the world. I hear this is alleviated in later novels, but I still think that instead of a mediocre, drawn out thirteen volume series, Jordan could have crafted an incredible<\/em> 6-7 volume story.<\/p>\n

\tJoe himself touches on this syndrome a bit in the comments<\/a> to his blog post, “Really long series do tend to sprawl and very often decline in quality. With some you can actually see the books getting fatter as they progress down your shelf – a good indicator of a bit of a loss of focus. Perhaps that’s the real issue some readers have with books that don’t resolve – they’ve seen series decline so often and never really reach a satisfactory conclusion that they’ve come to expect it.” Needless to say, I think he really hit the nail on the head with this one. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m cooler to long series that haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been finished because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen so many others, with strong beginnings, dwindle in quality in later volumes.<\/p>\n

In the end, despite being able to enjoy long, epic-lengthed series, I always find myself drawn more to shorter series and even standalone novels. Right Now I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m reading Tobias Buckell<\/a>‘s Crystal Rain<\/strong>, a 350 page, stand alone novel that manages to feel chalk full of content despite its short length. Tobias has hit a real sweet spot for me: short, stand alone novels with subtle ties (recurring characters\/themes, etc…) and between them. Terry Brooks used<\/em> to writer novels like this and it was one of the things that first attracted me to his novels.<\/p>\n

\"CrystalSo, I like short novels, or at the very least would prefer a story to be told in nothing longer than a trilogy, which affords the perfect opportunity for the natural beginning\/middle\/end structure of a story, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not the only one. “For me, if you can’t get a story told in three big-ass books you may need to do some serious self-editing.”<\/em> says Abercrombie<\/a>, an author who will publish the final novel in his first trilogy next year and is currently working on a pair of stand alone novels set in the same world as his trilogy. Brahm_K<\/strong>, of the Westeros Forums<\/a> agrees, “if you can’t say what you want to say in less than 10,000 pages, is it really worth it? I’d say it can be, but its much more often not.”<\/p>\n

Taking a look at sales figures, though, it seems that people like myself, Joe Abercrombie and Brahm_K are in the minority. Joe Abercrombie, Charles De Lint and R. Scott Bakker (all authors who generally work in the trilogy or standalone format) are big stars in the message board and blog world, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s people like the aforementioned Robert Jordan (11 novels), Terry Goodkind (11 novels), Terry Brooks<\/a> (19 Shannara Novels) and Raymond E. Feist<\/a> (26 novels) that resonate the most with casual fantasy readers. For some reason the average person interesting in Fantasy seems drawn to these exceptionally long and often redundant multi-volume series. Is it because they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re safe? No need to take a chance on other authors? Or is it simple a snowballing effect that starting early in the careers of these novelists and just never stopped rolling and growing ever bigger?<\/p>\n

Whatever a reader enjoys, I think we can all agree that in the end, short or long, a novel stands solely on the strength of the writing, the charisma of the characters and the ability it has to draw a reader in for as long as needed to tell the story being told.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A little over a week ago one of my favourite new authors, Joe Abercrombie wrote an interesting (and wonderfully long) blog post about the trend in the current SF\/F markets towards long, drawn out multi-volume stories that seem to lose focus as they trundle ever on *coughrobertjordancough*. Not surprisingly, the ever charming and devilishly clever… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n