Chapter 16: Hope
In which Galatea explains her absence.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Galatea encountered a chapter that didn't entirely suck and it shocked her so much she went into hibernation for three years.
Aaaaaand we're back!
All of that said, the silver lining of my pandemic time has been the presence in my life of a wonderful new group of friends, all of them genre creators in some way, all meeting regularly to share updates, support each other, talk craft, and just generally bring a little joy to each other's chaotic existences. These people are amazing, and I can honestly say I don't know that I'd have maintained my sanity in lockdown without them. At any rate, I got into a discussion about Name of the Wind with a couple of such friends, and hearing my own, incredibly specific hatred of this series echoed back to me by genre writers I love and respect was so weirdly validating that I realised I really want to finish this fucker as a point of pride. Plus, I sent this spork to L, one of the writer friends, and she loved it and said she wanted to read more, and we all know what happens when a writer gets her ego buffed.
In other words: L, this is your fault. I hope you're happy.
On to the spork. I'll be honest: one of the reasons I lost momentum at this chapter before is that it's a bit of a tricky one to get a handle on. On the one hand, things actually happen! Kvothe's entire existence is upended - the cheque that the last chapter wrote with such surprising subtlety gets cashed in a big way here. This is, narratively speaking, a major turning point.
On the other hand, it suffers from an awful lot of predictable Rothfuss-wank, and it dumps us into a stretch of chapters that are so mind-numbingly boring - and so full of Galatea-enraging music fail - that it's created a bit of a psychological block for me. I know that what's coming will be quite fun to spork. I'm looking forward to enumerating all the ways Rothfuss has no fucking clue how a lute works. But I can't quite shake the sinking knowledge that this chapter is the last place the book does anything unusual before settling into the groove that will define the rest of the series, and that groove is a goddamned slog.
But because I love you, and because my recently-buffed ego must express itself, and because this is as good a way as any to procrastinate on all the other projects that I don't have to do anonymously and that might actually make me money, I'm going to get past that hump and keep sporking this fucking book.
We dive right in with some description of how Kvothe fills his time now that Ben and his caravan full of distractions are gone. Honestly, it's all perfectly workmanlike - it's believable as first-person narration, it makes in-world sense, and it's not the world's best prose but at least it doesn't embarrass itself by forcing adjectives to awkwardly verb all over the place. I get the strong sense that Rothfuss didn't really care much about this section, viewing it as purely necessary to get us into the next chunk of story; the irony (once again) is that it benefits from his lack of attention by not being overwritten to death.
Just a couple of things worth quoting:
The roads were good this time of year, so we made excellent time traveling north through the Commonwealth: fifteen, twenty miles a day as we searched out new towns to play.
I still don't know when we are. The chapter begins with "over the next months", so we know time has passed since Ben left, but it doesn't seem like that long ago that winter made the roads near-impassable. This is fundamentally a first-person fail, I think: Rothfuss is aiming for a sense of immediacy by writing very much in a "now" as the narrator experiences it, but in this case something like "the roads were better by early spring..." would give the reader a solid when on which to anchor themselves, and would sound more natural as narration.
Over-Reliable Narrator: 10
Then, in a section on Kvothe learning court manners from his mother:
I knew a little from our infrequent stays with Baron Greyfallow...
Emphasis mine: I point this out only as a reminder that either Greyfallow is the world's worst sponsor, or Rothfuss really didn't think through how this whole thing worked. The troupe should have spent the entire winter at court, and they should to some degree be "on call" for Greyfallow, since he's paying them to exist.
I Have An Interrogative: 55
Once again, Kvothe's scenes with his mother are actually quite sweet and believably written. Rothfuss still throws reporting verbs - "I protested", "I groused", "I said adverbly" - when "I said" would be more than fine, but Kvothe comes across as a precocious child instead of a creepy mini-adult, and his mother honestly has quite a lot of personality for a character who still doesn't have a bloody name.
Ladies And Gentlemen: 25
My spork, my rules.
One more quote from this section, because I'm petty:
"Father doesn’t worry about which fork to use and who outranks who,” I groused.
My mother frowned, her eyes narrowing.
“Who outranks whom,” I said grudgingly.
I like to imagine that, upon reading this line, Rothfuss' editor cackled like a hyena for twenty minutes before getting thoroughly drunk on bourbon and rye.
Kvothe's mother gets him to study comportment by needling his vanity, which is beautifully believable, and the two of them make up a dirty song to help Kvothe remember courtly ranks. It's a cute little callback to the previous dirty ditty ("Seven things has Lady Lackless..."), and ends with this gem:
We laughed over it for a solid month, and she strictly forbade me to sing it to my father, lest he play it in front of the wrong people someday and get us all into serious trouble.
No snark, no shade: that is masterful foreshadowing that doesn't slap us in the face with its double meaning. A controversial song has already been accidentally sung in front of the wrong people, and serious trouble is on its way.
It is the fact that sometimes Rothfuss shows some actual potential that bugs me most of all.
We tumble into a bit of narrator fail involving a discussion about a fallen tree that would be excessive even if we weren't in first person.
Over-Reliable Narrator: 11
Repetition(epetition): 70
They decide, rather than rushing to clear the tree from the road, to take a break for...activities.
“I think it’s nice,” my mother said, walking around from the back of the wagon. “Gives us the chance for something hot,” she gave my father a significant look, “to eat. It gets frustrating making do with whatever you can grab at the end of the day. A body wants more.”
Alert The Editor: 135
For the commas that want so desperately to be em-dashes.
The Fifty Shades trilogy - another blight on the literary landscape - has a whole "I'm hungry...but not for food" motif that's repeated so often and so annoyingly it's made me never want to eat again. This reminds me of that, and therefore I hate it.
Kvothe's mother sends him off on a meaningless errand so she and Arliden can bone. I can't quite call it a first-person fail but there's an uncomfortable degree of understanding to eleven-year-old Kvothe's response; I think it's Rothfuss trying to filter it through the experience of adult Kvothe as narrator, but it's uncomfortably of a piece with all the other times Kvothe's been alarmingly precocious about sex.
Speaking most definitely as the adult narrator, Kvothe muses that he hopes his parents were happy in their last moments. It's gentle and contemplative, and a solid-if-unsubtle way to end the section. If Rothfuss could have restrained himself enough to get right down to narrative business in the next section after a few paragraphs of "I hope...I hope...I hope..." it would have created a great sense of rhythm here.
Title Drop: 24
I'm not petty enough to count every "I hope" in this section. It's actually a fairly effective stylistic device here, so the title drop is way less egregious than normal even with the repetition(epetition).
Unfortunately, Rothfuss is Rothfuss, and he never uses one stylistic device where he can find a way to use three. So we then get another mini-section I'm going to quote wholesale because I'm lazy:
Let us pass over the time I spent alone in the woods that evening, playing games that children invent to amuse themselves. The last carefree hours of my life. The last moments of my childhood.
Let us pass over my return to the camp just as the sun was beginning to set. The sight of bodies strewn about like broken dolls. The smell of blood and burning hair. How I wandered aimlessly about, too disoriented for proper panic, numb with shock and dread.
I would pass over the whole of that evening, in fact. I would spare you the burden of any of it if one piece were not necessary to the story. It is vital. It is the hinge upon which the story pivots like an opening door. In some ways, this is where the story begins.
So let’s have done with it.
The problem is, we're not passing over it. We're reading it, almost in real time, while being sort-of told that no, we're not actually reading it for real, right? To make it worse, we're actually about to read everything we're told we're going to "pass over" in excruciating, excessive detail.
Repetition(epetition): 71
NaNoPadMo: 38
And about that "excruciating, excessive detail": it's so excessive that I honestly have no idea what the "vital piece" of the story is. I'm not sure Rothfuss knows. We're right back in the end of the framing narrative, with Rothfuss-as-Kvothe covering his ass for all the waffle by telling us that every single word is vitally important, and if we can't see how yet that's just because the full extent of his genius hasn't been revealed to us.
And if this is "where the story begins", by the way, this is where the story should begin. We are sixteen chapters into this tome, and we're being told - not for the last time, mind - that only now is stuff really starting to get important.
Is This The Real Life: 22
Want to know how I can tell that most of what's been in this chapter up until this point has been - to Rothfuss' mind - unimportant, and how I can tell we're about to dive into a scene he wrote with one hand down his pants with extreme, loving care?
We've had one conspicuously-absent count: Simile Soup. In-depth examination of the counts will wait until the end of the book (gulp), but so far this one, along with Stu Stew, feels like the most consistent symptom of all of the ways this book is the work of an unskilled writer. In the chapters and sections I like, it drops out almost entirely, giving way to a brisk and competent voice. In the chapters that are bogged down with padding and wheel-spinning and Kvothe-wank, it's there every other sentence, practically grabbing the reader by the neck and forcing them to slow down to a crawl so as to experience every second of Rothfuss' epic by excruciating inches.
Well, right on cue, it's back to us with the totally redundant "It is the hinge upon which the story pivots like an opening door."
Simile Soup: 53
And after three years on the bench, that count's about to come back into play in a big way.
Check out the very first paragraph of the section Kvothe's just told us must be experienced via the scenic route:
Scattered patches of smoke hung in the still evening air. It was quiet, as if everyone in the troupe was listening for something. As if they were all holding their breath. An idle wind tussled the leaves in the trees and wafted a patch of smoke like a low cloud toward me. I stepped out of the forest and through the smoke, heading into the camp.
If I tally every unnecessary simile as we go through this section we'll be here until the heat death of the universe, so I'll save some time: in this section alone - not even the rest of the chapter, just this section - I counted twenty-nine similes I thought were at best unnecessary, at worst actively detrimental. Twenty-fucking-nine.
That's a lot of seemed likes and looked likes and felt likes and things reminding Kvothe of other things, but the absolute worst of these are the "as if" similes. This is a stylistic flourish that is so peculiarly Rothfuss it's almost funny, and it is structured like so: a character performs an action, and Rothfuss tells us it is done "as if" that character were doing something THAT THE ACTION ITSELF CLEARLY FUCKING IMPLIES.
Examples:
I stepped back as it gave way, the wagon splintering as if its wood were rotten as an old stump.
...his body was relaxed, as if he had just stood and stretched.
Some of them smiled, hard and brittle, as if enjoying a particularly good joke.
The cool voice caught slightly on the last word, as if it were difficult to say.
Every stylistic device has its purpose. I don't want to be one of those assholes who says "A writer should never use 'as if' lest they be excommunicated from the literary community" - even as a fairly hand-holdy device, it can be very effective and sometimes is necessary to make absolutely sure the reader is following the action. One or two instances dotted across this section wouldn't bother me.
Rothfuss uses it thirteen times. That's thirteen times in this section alone - in fact, the phrase "as if" doesn't appear anywhere else in this chapter. That's thirteen times Rothfuss reaches through the book, grabs me by the hand, and yanks me to the exact emotional mark he thinks I should be standing on.
I can't honestly call it padding, even though it unnecessarily increases the word count every single time. I can't call it that because that would imply that Rothfuss were doing it deliberately, even if for a purpose that doesn't do anything for the book except make it longer. It's not deliberate padding here; it's just bad writing. Every single one of these "as if" similes could either be excised completely, or integrated smoothly into the surrounding text. Rothfuss is just too in love with the atmosphere he's trying to create, and too incompetent to create it by doing anything other than waving his arms at us.
Simile Soup: 82
What's that, I hear you say? Does anything actually happen in this section that Rothfuss has crafted so clumsily lovingly for us?
Actually yes. Everyone fucking dies.
This is what's so important Rothfuss had to write it twice. Kvothe comes back from his errand to find that everyone in his troupe is dead, the camp has been destroyed, and the Chandrian are here.
On some level, I find myself genuinely at a loss here. I took a break to fill out onboarding paperwork for a new job before starting this paragraph because calculating tax withholdings seemed less of a burden than trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes this section such a stumbling block for me. And I keep coming back to this one, simple fact: it's really badly written. It's passive, it's meandering, it has no emotional impact, and it turns Kvothe into a lifeless observer of the most significant moment in his young life. It's just bad.
Some writers are "plotters": they know the architecture of a book before sitting down to write the prose of it, and build their story carefully over a well-constructed skeleton. Some writers are "pantsers": they improvise as they go, writing prose that feels right and discovering the story on the way. Most pro writers are a little of both, because they recognise that there are benefits and drawbacks to each approach.
And then there are what I call "string of pearls" writers, who start with the scenes they're most excited about - the deaths, the sex, the battles, the meet-cutes - and then, when they've written the scenes they actually give a shit about, they string them all together with whatever will get the job done.
Many, many fanfic writers are stringers. No tea, no shade: it makes absolute sense for the genre, because a driving motivator for fanfic is getting to write those scenes that weren't in the original property. Plot's pretty secondary to living out those what-ifs you wish were in the original book.
Here are some other writers I'm pretty sure are stringers: Stephenie Meyer. E L James. Lani Sarem. A number of the less-than-great dystopian YA authors who flung out books after The Hunger Games. And, for absolute damn certain, one Mr Patrick Rothfuss.
Now, a lot of writers start out as stringers. I certainly did. If writing the fuck out of a particular sex scene or battle motivates you to write an entire damn book, more power to you. But writers who git gud almost always move away from the string-of-pearls approach, for three very good reasons:
- The difference between the writing style in the "pearls" and in the "string" is egregious, made worse that by the time a writer gets to the string, they're already exhausted and they've blown their creative wad on the pearls.
- It can lead to some bad structural issues as writers try to string together pearls that don't really belong in the same narrative, but that are too emotionally precious to discard in favour of better plotting.
- It is a violation of the unspoken contract between author and reader: that the book is meant to be read by other people. String-of-pearls writing is fundamentally selfish, in that the writer is putting all their effort into the stuff that they themselves want to write, written as they themselves would want to read it.
A sad side-effect of 3) is what we're seeing at play in this section - a section that, I must remind you, is of critical importance to the movement of the plot. A string-of-pearls writer might put all their love and attention and time into the scenes they consider pearls...but those pearls often end up the worst-written parts of the book. When E L James wrote the sex scenes in Fifty Shades with only one hand on the keyboard, she wasn't writing them for anyone but herself. If an extra unnecessary adjective enhanced her fantasy, in it went. Same goes for Stephenie Meyer and all the moping and mooning in Twilight, not to mention all the "aren't-I-awesome" in Breaking Dawn. It was her wish-fulfillment, and the words that fulfilled her wishes went on the page, regardless of how anyone else might feel reading them.
This scene here, in which Kvothe discovers his entire family murdered and encounters the Chandrian for the first time, is without question one of Rothfuss' pearls. It's overwritten because he enjoyed the satisfaction of getting every thought in his head onto the page. He's living the moment through Kvothe, stopping for every sight and smell and sound, every overwrought simile that might help get across just how goddamn important this scene is.
It's not that he doesn't trust a reader not to get it if he doesn't hold their hands. It's that, when it comes to scenes like this, there is no reader.
Sorry. Had to break the screed up somehow.
A couple of small notes before I summarise the important plot points, tally some blanket counts, and get the fuck out of this section:
Firstly, there's nothing wrong with a little string-of-pearls writing. It's a tool just like pantsing and plotting, and ultimately the best writers mix and match techniques to get the best book out of it. I used to string-of-pearls everything, until I realised I was falling into the exact same trap Rothfuss does: the scenes I wanted most were badly-written, and everything else was better but I barely cared enough to write it. My approach was to start using my pearls as bribes for a more linear approach: I know roughly where in the plot they land, and I get to write them as rewards for writing all the stuff that sets them up. The best thing you can do for yourself as a stringer, no matter where in the process you write your pearls, is to learn to treat the pearls as editable and disposable. Be as self-indulgent on the first draft as you need to be to get words on the page. Then take a deep breath, let it go, and be prepared to cut out a bunch of the stuff you enjoyed writing, or even to lose the entire pearl.
Secondly, I'm going to tally up bulk counts for this section and ask you to trust me that they're accurate, because if I list every repetition...well, at risk of repeating myself, we'll be here until the heat death of the universe. The really important count for this section is this:
Alert The Editor: 136
Part of an editor's job is to save inexperienced authors from themselves, and that's exactly what Rothfuss' editor didn't do here. Now, I don't know their relationship or how many times Rothfuss angrily wrote STET over the editor's notes. Remember, we're in Book 1 still: at this point Rothfuss was a complete unknown and the relationship with his editor was still being built. I can't even speculate whose fault it is that the editor fundamentally didn't do their job.
The fact remains: this is the editor's job.
Anyway, bulk counts and then we'll move on:
Repetition(epetition): 89
Over-Reliable Narrator: 12
Alert The Editor: 142
Mother Tongue: 20
That last is for a "naming" that's not as clever as Rothfuss thinks it is, and that is so clearly Latin-based that it breaks the book in the same way those two donkeys did a few chapters ago.
Alright, so what actually happens? Kvothe comes back from his errands to find the entire troupe murdered. There are some mysterious figures at the fire - figures we can reasonably assume to be at least some of the Chandrian, even though they aren't named as such. One of them, Cinder, taunts Kvothe a bit, until another one, Haliax, gets impatient and tells Cinder to just kill him already. By way of some exceptionally clumsy exposition - of the "tell me about ourselves" variety - we learn that Haliax is the leader, that he doesn't get out much, that the other Chandrian have been getting a little too murder-happy, and that there are actually a couple of forces (the Amyr and the Sithe) that inspire some level of fear in the Chandrian.
Despite the fact that it would take Cinder less than a second to actually kill Kvothe and end this godforsaken book, for some reason they all get distracted by something and literally vanish in a puff of smoke. I'm sure this won't come back to bite them in any way, mostly because it would have to happen in Book 3 and I don't think that sucker's ever coming out.
I Have An Interrogative: 56
Rothfuss then lies right to our faces again by writing:
I will not burden you with what followed.
...and then proceeding to burden us with it for seven paragraphs.
NaNoPadMo: 39
Kvothe finds his parents' wagon, and it's honestly not made at all clear whether he finds their bodies as well. I mean, we get this:
How I scrabbled in the dirt until my fingers were bloody and raw. How I found my parents…....with that four-dotted ellipsis I loathe so dearly...
Alert The Editor: 143
...but then when he gets to the wagon, Rothfuss literally doesn't mention whether his parents are in it. Kvothe climbs into the bed and talks about the familiar items and his parents' smell, and it seems like the kind of description that would include a pair of corpses if they were there. But there's nowhere else in the chapter that says he finds them anywhere else, and with all the loving excruciating description to which we've been subjected, I can't believe we weren't treated to a catalogue of every drop of blood on their mutilated cadavers.
I think Rothfuss is trying to imply that Kvothe found their bodies somewhere in that four-dotted ellipsis and is sparing us (and Devan) the gory details, but it's really clumsy and just invites another one of these:
I Have An Interrogative: 57
"No body, no death" is a trope in genre stories for a reason. If the reader is to have an emotional reaction to key characters being dead, you'd better show us how incredibly dead they are.
Anyway, Kvothe lights some candles for comfort, falls asleep, and wakes when the wagon catches fire. As much as I feel it's a bit unrealistic that Kvothe doesn't just burn to death himself, I'm sparing it a count because I don't feel like looking up accurate immolation times for small children. I'll save that for after the new job's background check.
Kvothe manages to rescue his father's lute and the book that Ben gave him, and escapes into the forest. He walks for a while, then gets the lute out and plays until he can't play any more. If this section ended a much better-written chapter, I might actually feel a twinge of human emotion at it.
Sadly, all I feel is rage.
Meet me back at the Waystone next time for another interlude, more faffing around with Bast and Devan, and a shockingly effective character moment for Kvothe.
No comments:
Post a Comment