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Author: Smurfin

Tolkein is a bad writer - discuss

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 Author| 25-11-2019 04:34:08 Mobile | Show all posts
So is LOTR   To claim otherwise hints at another thread in the book forum - "Are you a book snob?"

GRRM is one of the most accomplished writers within the genre.  Learn how to write?  His writing, characters, plotlines etc are stunning.

It's a big story arc, but pointless stuff?  This is what characterises LOTR for me.

Do give it another go, although from your posts you seem to hold Tolkien's work with such reverence that it's easy to forget - entertaining, tightly structured writing and believable, three dimensional characters is whats moves a story along

I may seem dismissive of Tolkien but far from it - I loved his books as a child.  But anyone who thinks it's great writing now has clearly never read a good book in the last few years
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25-11-2019 04:34:08 Mobile | Show all posts
@Smurfin

You asked the question and I obliged with an answer. Apologies if the answer does not meet with your expectations.

Your last paragraph has a large hook, pity you forgot to bait it.
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 Author| 25-11-2019 04:34:09 Mobile | Show all posts
No need to apologise

The last paragraph wasn't intended to bait you, more in response to your comment that GRRM needs to learn to write.  Horses for courses.
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25-11-2019 04:34:10 Mobile | Show all posts
Yup - OK mate. No problem.
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25-11-2019 04:34:11 Mobile | Show all posts
Don't take this the wrong way, Smurfin'. It's not a criticism of your tastes, but I felt Alan's statement that the author needs to learn how to write was unfairly dismissed.

I've skimmed the prologue, and I'm not passing judgement this early but I can see what Alan means on the basis of that introduction - the author does need to learn how to write. I'm hoping it picks up as the novel proper begins, but it's the most awkward, immature opening to a book I've ever read. I remember first reading Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic and being surprised at how distant the characters were from the reader. Pratchett clearly hadn't found his voice at that stage and couldn't paint a realistic picture for the reader. In comparison, in the prologue to A Game of Thrones, GRRM doesn't seem to have a voice. Like a writer of the most amateurish, cack-handed fan-fiction, he seems to want to write something but doesn't know what or how to.

I'll pick out a few points as evidence.

"Never believe anything you hear at a woman's tit."

Okay, so the author is telling us here that this character is such a complete w*nker that we're not going to care whether he lives or dies, or at least that's what I'd assume his motives to be. Unfortunately, it's not just the characters who use such vacuous, imbecilic phrases.

Ser Waymar Royce glanced at the sky with disinterest.

A character might show his own sense of superiority, his stupidity or his sexuality by glancing at another character with disinterest, but why do I need to know that he glanced at the sky? What part in the scene is the sky about to play that Ser Waymar Royce is foolishly overlooking? In the idiom of GRRM - answer came there none. None of what follows is worth reading.

Here comes the first piece of evidence that this is equivalent to really bad fan-fiction:

Will could sense something else in the older man. You could taste it; a nervous tension that came perilous close to fear.

"You could taste it". Well, no I couldn't, because I wasn't there. Don't drag me into this scene - I'm the reader. If the author wants to speak directly to the reader then he should say, "you could have tasted it if you'd been there." However, I don't think that is GRRM's intention. I think he just hasn't worked out yet that this usage of "you" is a colloquialism, and what he intends to say is "one could taste it."

Now, that's just bad grammar. What's really wrong with that phrase is that no one - not I, not Will, not GRRM - could actually taste Gared's "nervous tension", not unless the man was a walking Van der Graaf generator. It's an empty, meaningless phrase, topped only by the end of the sentence: "perilous close". It's "perilously close", or should be unless the author is writing in the vernacular of serfdom, which he's trying very hard not to.

By this point in the prologue I realised I was reading an eight year-old's response to a school assignment. Yet it got worse.

The first time he had been sent beyond, all the old stories had come rushing back, and his bowels had turned to water.

Too many commas, stories don't come rushing back (the effects they had on you do), and a cliche for good measure.

Until tonight.

Not a sentence.

There was an edge to this darkness that made his hackles rise.

Or got his hackles up?

A cold wind was blowing out of the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things.

Trees are living things. Bad simile.

... something cold and implacable that loved him not.

This is such a poor and misplaced attempt to use Tolkien's "high" idiom in a narrative that is base and conversational that I metaphorically vomited. In fact, my bowels turned to water at this point.

Will wanted nothing so much as to ride hellbent for the safety of the Wall, but that was not a feeling to share with your commander.

His commander. Not mine. I wasn't there. His or one's commander.

Especially not a commander like this one.

Like "until tonight", earlier, this is straight out of the Dan Brown guide to writin'. It's not a sentence. It's certainly not a paragraph.

He was a handsome youth of eighteen, grey-eyed and graceful and slender as a knife.

As graceful as a knife? What an appalling grasp of analogy this man has. An inanimate straight edge cannot have grace as an attribute. Gah.

He wore black leather boots, black woolen pants, black moleskin gloves, and a fine supple coat of gleaming black ringmail over layers of black wool and boiled leather.

Yeah, we get the idea. He likes black. A lot.

soft as sin.

OFFS.

Will reflected as he sat shivering atop his garron.

Astride, surely, or was he standing on the saddle?

He studied the deepening twilight in that half-bored, half-distracted way he had.

I'm paying attention, you know. Half-distracted study. More not-paying-attention than studying, wouldn't you say?

Mallister freeriders had caught him red-handed in the Mallisters’ own woods, skinning one of the Mallisters’ own bucks

This was on the Mallisters' land, then, was it?

No one could move through the woods as silent as Will...

Silently, not silent.

"when I was half a boy"

Does that mean something or is it another empty phrase?

I'm bored now. It continues like that, including "the Others" (your characters may be superstitious fools but don't presume that using a euphemism instils a sense of dread in me) and "the Other halted", "kept the silence" instead of "kept his silence", "a high, thin sound at the edge of hearing, like an animal screaming in pain" when two swords clash, and "His moleskin glove came away soaked with red" (this is the black moleskin glove, right?).

This is such a short passage and yet it's riddled with churlish, amateur, awkward writing. The author doesn't appear to be able to construct a sentence with more than one clause, which makes the rhythm stilted and childlike. It doesn't compare favourably with The Da Vinci Code, let alone serious fiction like LotR.

Smurfin', you didn't ask me what I thought but you asked Alan and when he told you, you weren't impressed. Indeed, to say of Tolkien, "anyone who thinks it's great writing now has clearly never read a good book in the last few years" is unnecessarily antagonistic and, if I may say, not a little supercilious.

I haven't commented on GRRM's pacing and plotting because I've read only one very short sequence, but he fails utterly to get the basics of writing right and if his book continues in this vein then I really have more mature things to waste my time on. Tolkien is not to everyone's taste, but to hold this kind of writing up as an example of what is better is, in my opinion, a mistake.

Alan - Ancient Evenings sounds more up my street. I'm in the middle of Robert Harris's Pompeii at the moment, but it's a re-read and easily discarded. I enjoyed his Imperium as well, but I'm saving Lustrum for my summer holidays. I've also enjoyed a number of Bernard Cornwell's novels (excluding the Sharpe series, which I've never tried), including the Warlord chronicles, the Grail Quest novels and the Saxon stories. Stonehenge was a little cracker, too.

Both: there are many readers who specifically do not read Tolkien because it's fantasy. It may well take place in a false reality but, as I said earlier, so does all fiction. The point about Tolkien is that it maintains an extreme degree of verisimilitude and it is very easy to suspend disbelief when reading it. It reads like an historical fiction, not like a book about magic and eldritch. To pick out one point, that (to my knowledge) no other Fantasy writers appear capable of emulating - his characters' names resonate with their languages and peers and forebears. This removes the kind of jolt you get when trying to read lines of dialogue spoken by characters like "Ser Waymar Royce", "Mance Rayder" or "Ephron Vestrit" and makes the text flow so much more naturally. It is quite common for readers of Tolkien to be appalled at the level and content of writing in the Fantasy genre. To approach Tolkien from the perspective of Dungeons & Dragons is like asking some second-rate schlock horror director to make a movie out of it. It's no wonder they struggle to enjoy The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales.
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25-11-2019 04:34:12 Mobile | Show all posts
Hi Genji

I see you can, when necessary, aim a straight arrow. Legolas could do with you!

Having read both 'The Hobbit' and 'The Silmarillion' (well.... most of it) I agree LOTR bridges both. I forgot about Tolkien's Englishness which of course accounts for the Shires and Hobbits in an old-England sense ('my country'). However, Tolkien had a romantic soul and his 'cool and clear tone and quality' and 'of a land long now steeped in poetry' shows he has a view of old England which is somewhat out of step with reality. There are no slums, beggars, prostitutes, vitamin deficiencies or diseased limbs in LOTR. Having just written that I am pleased there wasn't!

Keep that in mind though because I disagree with "maintains an extreme degree of verisimilitude", in LOTR the good folk are good and the baddies are all nasty creatures. A good-looking, tall, blue-eyed, upright and free-thinking bad guy does not exist in LOTR!

Robert Harris? Never heard of him - but I'll try and find 'Pompeii' and give it a go. Sure you don't mean Frank Harris!? (* Cough * ).

Alan
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 Author| 25-11-2019 04:34:12 Mobile | Show all posts
Unfairly dismissed?  Not at all, it wasn't backed up by anything.

Why did you skim it?  Better to read it properly, rather than searching for reasons to back up Alan's comments, and a single chapter from 2000 pages is hardly grounds to say "the author needs to learn how to write".  

Some of your comments I find perplexing too.

Why does that make the character a complete *******?  I actually think that's a great line.

Why not?    It may be an unecessary line, but at least it's just a line and not a whole chapter on Tom Bombadil

The memories do, and this sentence perfectly conveys it even if he doesn't use the word.

Oh. My. God.  Hmm, slap my wrists, that's not a sentence either.  It still works.

And your point is?  I can't quite see it.

Tolkien's text flow's so much more naturally?  I find GRRM names quite easy to disgest and they roll nicely off the tongue.  Did you need to read them several times?

The fact that you tar fantasy fiction with a "Dungeons and Dragons" brush says it all.  I rest my case.

I appreciate you both love Tolkien's work (and so much as to delve into background motives, parallels and methaphors), but I'm sad to say your love of this and easy dismissal of authors such as Dan Brown and GRRM (because he can't write well allegedly) just smacks of book snobbery.  And of course, LOTR couldn't possibly be fantasy, because that would be beneath you

Anyway, I don't think we'll agree on anything here, so we'll just have to agree to disagree and hey - it would be boring if we all shared the same opinions wouldn't it?

Cheers
Matt

PS It's not difficult to pick fault with Tolkien's work either
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25-11-2019 04:34:13 Mobile | Show all posts
Just my opinions, Alan, but I let forth a wordless cry of dismay that the Elves couldn't use my paltry skills at Helm's Deep.

But Middle-earth is not England. The Shire is English, no doubt, but only sunny Sunday afternoons drinking tea on the pavilion. I have no doubt there were a great number of slums in Mordor (there were, in fact, and they had spread even to Hobbiton by the end of the book), populated by crippled beggars, prostitutes (I vaguely remember Tolkien himself stating that Orcs procreate in the natural manner, perhaps in his letters) and vitamin deficiencies (or, at any rate, magnesium deficiency) in Middle-earth. Let's not forget, also, the hideous pseudo-heroin-dependent symptoms the One Ring instils in its mortal keepers.

Life in Middle-earth is no Hobbits' walking party.

Ah well, therein lies one of the sensible and serious criticisms of Tolkien's work, of which there are many.

The good guys are, indeed, almost universally excruciatingly good, while the baddies are nearly always unconscionably bad, and almost never the twain shall meet. Only, really, in Gollum do we see a bad guy wrestle with his conscience. Only in Boromir do we see a hero succumb to his desire, or in Denethor a noble lord to his pride. Only in Ted Sandyman or Bill Ferny do we see the common man seek to writhe his way up the greasy pole by petty opportunism.

However, none of this detracts from the book's verisimilitude. It remains true to itself and the world it describes. It is a tale of deeds and accomplishments, and it naturally focuses on deeds and accomplishments. Who knew that Tiger Woods was an excessive philanderer? If he had never crashed into that fire hydrant then his story would forever have been of the monumentally proficient golfer.

Incidentally, Sauron (in his mortal form) was a figure of angelic beauty.

But you are correct. Aragorn never fails in his dedication, never doubts his path, never lets his co-workers down. But that's just Aragorn for you. Some heroes are like that. Tolkien wrote not just in an era, but also in an idiom that painted its heroes as true and just and fair, and its villains as abominable, bloodthirsty b*stards. That's the book, and I believe it maintains its own internal truth.

Bob Harris wrote Enigma and Fatherland. He's not bad. I don't know who Frank Harris is.
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25-11-2019 04:34:14 Mobile | Show all posts
Hi Smurfin

You are the one who mentioned George R R Martin in two or three posts strongly recommending him.

I mentioned "Could not get on with it unfortunately" in passing, referring to a GRRM novel.

You followed with "Out of interest, what was it that you didn't like?"

I followed with a post giving the reasons why.

Genji also gave a detailed list of why he didn't like your recommendation.

These were both replies to your query.

You then give quite an abusive tirade about our replies to your query!

If you don't like the answers why ask the question?

Alan
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 Author| 25-11-2019 04:34:15 Mobile | Show all posts
Abusive tirade?  It was nothing of the sort.
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