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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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I don't recall having much to complain about with regard to the writing, but I have absolutely no taste when it comes to prose and basically anything other than fanfiction obviously written by teenagers reads okay to me, if I like the plot. If anything, I find it hard to read well-written things because I'm an idiot and literary prose makes my head hurt.

Yeah, I don't really agree with the complaint that Brandon Sanderson's books are poorly written because of the prose. Prose is completely incidental to the quality of a book, IMO. I read books for the plot and for the characters (in that order), with prose only extremely rarely coming onto my radar. Literally the only time it happened was when reading Pat Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear, when I realized that while the protagonist was in the fae realm he started to speak in iambic pentameter. It was a neat trick, but otherwise meh. Not worth caring about.

My personal issue with Elantris is that it's just kind of boring. It's not bad or anything, but I honestly probably would've not finished the book if I hadn't already read Sanderson's work and liked it. I kept waiting and waiting for the story to get good, and it just never did. But it's his first book so I guess it's not unreasonable that it isn't as good as his later ones.

Prose isn't the most important aspect to me, though I do notice when an author's prose is clunky and their dialog wooden, and appreciate it when it's not. But when I say I think Sanderson is a mediocre writer, I don't just mean he doesn't write in high-falutin' literary style with pretty words. I mean his dialog is frequently as cringey as a dad joke, his storytelling is a trope parade punctuated by the sound of dice rolling, and his characters are collections of personality quirks referenced over and over. Especially his female main characters, who with a few rare exceptions like Vin in Mistborn, are basically all the same character. (If you played a drinking game every time the main female protagonist "blushes," you'd die of alcohol poisoning before finishing the first book.)

That reminds me of an old wheel of time drinking game - a shot every time someone expresses themselves through their nose - snorts or sniffs or the like. You're lucky to get through more than one chapter.

Prose certainly can be important to the quality of the book. The Old Man and the Sea gets pretty much all its value from its style. The Lord of the Rings gets an awful lot out of it, with its ambiance of nostalgia. But yes, I agree that quite a lot of the time, I don't really care too much about it. People don't read Sanderson for the prose.

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