Chapter 6: The Price of Remembering (Part II)
In which Galatea gives Rothfuss writing advice and empathises with his editor.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Kvothe was a dick to Devan and nothing else happened, which was frustrating because of all the things that would have been happening in a better book.
When I took acting classes for a while, one of the first things we did was a "neutral scene". It was a page or so of very non-specific questions and answers that it was our job, as actors, to imbue with meaning. By the end of a lot of workshopping, each pair of actors in the group had used gesture, tone and timing to create oceans of subtext beneath the very bland lines of the scripted scene. It ended up being a surprisingly powerful exercise, and when we later moved into more dialogue-heavy scenes, we'd often trim them down to the "neutral scene" version in workshops to remind ourselves how much of the scene's heavy lifting was not in the superficial spoken words and described actions. I'm reminded of this because in this chapter - perhaps more than any other so far - that's exactly what Rothfuss is not doing. As a reader, I hate feeling like I'm being taken by the hand and gently guided through a scene's meaning, and I hate it more in this instance because I really do feel like there's a very good scene hidden underneath all the hand-holding.
As an exercise, I pulled this chapter out of the book and took a hatchet to it, trimming down everything unnecessary to see if I could use Rothfuss' own words to do what I think he was trying to do with this chapter. The result is here if you want to see it; it's not great because I didn't let myself re-write or change the order of any of Rothfuss' words (except for grammar), but I think excising large chunks of the text makes a massive difference to the balance and effectiveness of the scene - and underlines just how much of this book really is bloat.
“I have it all right here.” Kote gestured expansively behind the bar.
Repetition(epetition): 11
Kvothe made a "dramatic sweeping gesture" a couple of pages ago, and he's going to gesture in some dramatic or expansive fashion twice more before the end of the chapter.
Repetition(epetition): 13
Might as well tally 'em up now. This kind of repetition is okay if a character is doing something incredibly specific, like a nervous tic or tell. And Rothfuss does at least try to vary up the descriptors of the gestures, though they're all some variation on "a gesture that encompasses all the things in the immediate vicinity and possibly beyond it too". But the word "gesture" covers pretty much the entire range of human body language, and without knowing what that gesture is all I'm picturing is Kvothe flailing his arms around like an amateur actor over-declaiming Shakespeare. Four times. Tell us he "swept his arm back towards the bar" once, and "splayed his long fingers out to point at the empty inn" another time, or something like that. There are plenty of specific options for a "dramatic, sweeping gesture", and using a few of them would build Kvothe's character, avoid repetition, and stop my mental image of the character being Wacky-Waving-Inflatable-Arm-Flailing-Tube-Kvothe.
Anyway, Kvothe lists off the selection of fruity liqueurs available at the Waystone while making it perfectly clear he'd like Devan to up and leave now. Devan gets frustrated, Kvothe is pissy, and it's basically a rinse and repeat of what happened before Kvothe started in on his mild-mannered innkeeper routine.
Chronicler’s face grew red. “I’d heard that Kvothe was fearless,” he said hotly.
The innkeeper shrugged. “Only priests and fools are fearless, and I’ve never been on the best of terms with God.”
Chronicler frowned, aware that he was being baited. “Listen,” he continued calmly, “I was extraordinarily careful. No one except Skarpi knew I was coming. I didn’t mention you to anyone. I didn’t expect to actually find you.”
“Imagine my relief,” Kote said sarcastically.Embarrassment to anger to indifference to awareness to calm to sarcasm, in the space of a seven-sentence conversation. All the emotional whiplash here is not helping my image of the two as amateur actors. Nor is it helping my image of Rothfuss as an amateur writer, because he's falling into a very typical amateur writer trap by qualifying every dialogue tag with some kind of descriptor or descriptive action. Inexperienced writers think they have to do this to keep the dialogue dynamic; unfortunately, inexperienced writers also know that they have to avoid repetition, with the result that characters sprint through emotions faster than a manic-depressive on the wrong medication.
I'm counting this as an editorial miss, because a good editor should have redlined almost all the emotional/dialogue tag descriptors and let the dialogue - as in the actual talking - do the actual talking. There's enough information in what's being said for an invested reader (and this far into the book we should be invested) to understand how the characters feel when they deliver their dialogue, and if Rothfuss feels a pressing need to qualify that dialogue then the problem is that the characters and their voices aren't distinct enough.
Alert The Editor: 17
Three counts: one for each time in that exchange a character speaks adverbly. I'd like to give it more, because this is far from the last time this problem shows up in this chapter alone. I suspect, however, that that will get difficult and very tedious to tally, so for now those three counts will have to do.
Devan presses Kvothe some more, but Kvothe cuts him off.
Kote shook his head. “It was a long time ago—”
“Not even two years,” Chronicler protested.
“—and I am not what I was,” Kote continued without pausing.
I Have An Interrogative: 22
Two years. Remember that, please. "Not even two years".
“And what was that, exactly?”
“Kvothe,” he said simply, refusing to be drawn any further into an explanation.This is the first time in the book - six chapters in - that Kvothe has acknowledged to anyone except Bast that he is, in fact, Kvothe. It should be a highly significant moment, but it isn't: in the next sentence he's right back to the innkeeper routine. Rothfuss should have saved Kvothe's admission of his own identity for the wham line at the end of the chapter: putting it here halts the build-up and robs the final line of most of its weight.
Alert The Editor: 18
Again: something a good editor should have pointed out.Kote looked up, and for a second Chronicler saw past the anger that lay glittering on the surface of his eyes. For a moment he saw the pain underneath, raw and bloody, like a wound too deep for healing.
Simile Soup: 23
"Like a wound too deep for healing" is more than this paragraph needs.
Kvothe asks Devan what he can possibly offer him to make revealing his identity worth it. Devan says that everyone thinks Kvothe is dead, and Kvothe points out that that's pretty much the end goal of faking his own death. I think Devan left a few of his IQ points on that rock in the woods.
Devan says everyone thinks Kvothe is a myth; Kvothe seems rather pleased until Devan qualifies that people don't think he existed in the first place. Kvothe is rather less pleased by this, but not nearly as displeased as I am.
I Have An Interrogative: 23
Remember that bit where it's only been two years? Given what we'll find out later about how stories attach themselves to Kvothe like flies to a dung heap, there is no way people doubt his very existence less than two years later. If he actually killed a king, there should still be a warrant for his arrest - this seems like the kind of world that would happily condemn his corpse to death if they could find him.
Is This The Real Life: 11
That's for the myth bit: Kvothe says that "[t]he best lies about [him] are the ones [he] told". I'll accept it as hyperbole for now, since Kvothe's still trying to get Devan to leave him alone, but unless the third book contains a lot of Kvothe's own myth-making that statement won't really be borne out by the text.
Devan tries to push Kvothe by saying that not all the stories paint him as a particularly great guy, but again Kvothe shrugs it off. Sure he's killed people, he says, but they all deserved it.
*looks at You Fucking Sociopath count*
What?
“Some are even saying that there is a new Chandrian. A fresh terror in the night. His hair as red as the blood he spills."Kvothe really needs to switch to a better hair dye. That's the only explanation I've got for how his hair goes from literally blood-red to barely-really-ginger and back again so quickly.
“The important people know the difference,” Kote said as if he were trying to convince himself, but his voice was weary and despairing, without conviction.Please stop holding my hand, Rothfuss. It's getting weird.
Repetition(epetition): 14
Convince/conviction.
Simile Soup: 24
Rothfuss should have stopped at "trying to convince himself".
Alert The Editor: 19
Failing that, Rothfuss' editor should have redlined the rest.
Devan points out that entertaining stories have more staying power than truth...
Is This The Real Life: 12
And then he accidentally finds Kvothe's berserk button by mentioning that some of the stories may have included a love interest. Kvothe cuts Devan off, mutters a bit, gets very quiet, gets very still, makes a fist, literally clenches a silence between his teeth, and finally - finally...
Eight inches away a bottle shattered.Let's get the housekeeping out of the way first:
Simile Soup: 24
Rothfuss blew his wad on the silence metaphor all the way back in the prologue. Picturing Kvothe biting a chunk out of an abstract concept and chewing on it does not help me take this scene seriously. Now...
Are you fucking kidding me??? Our first instance of actual magic - a major status change between the two characters, Kvothe revealing just a hint of his true power, a significant moment in the meeting of myth and reality, and Rothfuss buries it under a paragraph of limp foreplay?
Goddammit, that should be an absolute wham line, but Rothfuss' sad attempt to ratchet up the tension with that paragraph of build-up does the exact opposite.
Imagine if, instead of Kvothe interrupting Devan's "Some say there was a woman -", the breaking bottle cut him off. No build up, no watching Kvothe munching on an intangible while he clenches his fists, no gearing up to wonder what extreme thing he's going to say or do in response to Devan's having the audacity to mention his lady love, just bam! Bottle breaks. Not only would it move the scene along much quicker, but the readers would also get to share Devan's moment of trying to figure out just what the hell happened:
Chronicler felt himself go cold as he suddenly realized what a dangerous game he was playing. So this is the difference between telling a story and being in one, he thought numbly, the fear.It would have been fucking awesome if Rothfuss had the skill to make the readers think that at the same time as Devan. Maybe not "Shit, I'm in a story", but "Shit, we're reading this kind of story". Instead, what should be an incredible moment that literally changes the tenor of the whole scene - the whole book even - in an instant becomes barely a pinprick in between paragraphs of sluggish, purple description. And I did say "between": after the bottle breaks we have to waste time on the smell of strawberry wine and more tortured silence metaphors before we even get to Devan's reaction to the fact that Kvothe smashed a fucking bottle without so much as looking at it.
I know I'm harping on, but it's worth harping. Devan, the "great debunker" himself, who doesn't believe in magic or demons and who came to find the man underneath the myth, just saw real magic happen. Everything that isn't that moment and Devan reacting is pointless padding.
Simile Soup: 25
For that stupid goddamn silence.
NaNoPadMo: 18
A count for each paragraph sandwiching the breaking bottle.
Is This The Real Life: 13
For the obvious.
Alert The Editor: 20
Because identifying the key moments of a scene and helping the writer focus the prose on them is exactly an editor's goddamn job. I can only assume that by this point in the book Rothfuss' editor was as exhausted as I am.
Speaking of which, I really, really do not want to split this chapter into a third post, so let's see how much of the rest I can summarise.
Kvothe gets all pensive about the memory of the mystery lady, and Devan remembers a story about Kvothe tricking a demon to get his heart's desire and fighting an angel to keep it. I'm not summarising that, by the way: that's literally all the detail we get. If Rothfuss didn't want to put the full legend here (and thank God, because this chapter is already as bloated as a whale carcass) he should have saved it for when it was actually relevant to the story. There are more unnecessary similes about Kvothe's expression and voice, and Kvothe says some variation on "What do they know about it?" five times.
Simile Soup: 28
Repetition(epetition): 19
Is This The Real Life: 14
For a brief and exquisite moment we have some quality writing as Devan finally gets Kvothe's attention with the notion that he could set the record straight, and Kvothe cleans up the spilled wine. It's quiet, it's sparingly written and it's blessedly un-purple, making it an effective change to the pace that I actually kept almost wholesale in my hatchet job on the chapter.
One at a time, Kote wiped their bottoms clean of the strawberry wine and set them on the bar between himself and Chronicler, as if they might defend him.Except for "as if they might defend him". Stop holding my bloody hand if you want to keep yours.
Simile Soup: 29
Kvothe looks like he might be coming around to the idea of talking to Devan, then Devan fucks it up by saying he has to be in another town to interview an Earl in three days. He repeats that he was robbed earlier, in case we'd forgotten it since the start of the chapter.
Repetition(epetition): 20
Kvothe gets pissy again, insisting that he'll need three days. This is another thing that will be fucking hilarious later. Devan tries to reconcile Kvothe's demand with his timetable, can't, and suggests - quite reasonably - that he go do his bit with the Earl and come back afterwards to give Kvothe as much time as he likes. Then...
Kote gave Chronicler a look of profound disdain. “What gives you the slightest impression that I would be here when you came back?” he asked incredulously. “For that matter, what makes you think you’re free to simply walk out of here, knowing what you know?”
You Fucking Sociopath: 3
Why hello there. I'd missed you.
Whether or not it's sincere - and the fact that I have a You Fucking Sociopath count at all suggests that it is - Kvothe's threat to Devan gets worse the longer you think about it. So Devan already knows (or has guessed) enough that Kvothe's not letting him walk out of the inn alive. What exactly is Kvothe's plan for when he's given Devan his entire life story? He's not exactly going to know less at that point!
Devan is still too concussed to realise that three days from now he's a dead man, so he agrees. "'Then again,'" he says, "'You are Kvothe.'"
Rothfuss faffs around for a paragraph describing how Kvothe suddenly smiles and straightens up and looks taller and probably more like his head is on fire, and finally we get what should be the wham line of the whole fucking chapter:
“Yes, I suppose I am,” Kvothe said, and his voice had iron in it.It could be a great fucking line. It should be a great fucking line. It should be the first time Kvothe actually admits that he is Kvothe, and it should end the chapter with a fucking bang.
Sadly, because Rothfuss blew the moment halfway through the chapter and then buried the lede under paragraph upon paragraph of bloat, we get the sad whine of a deflating balloon instead.
NaNoPadMo: 19
Again: one count for the whole chapter, which really did not need to exist.
Thank God that's over.
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