The other week I finished Victory of Eagles, the fifth installment of Naomi Novik’s splendid ‘Temeraire’ series. I think it’s the best of the bunch so far. It’s much leaner (and meaner) than the previous books. Novik’s alternate history is entirely believable, even with the presence of dragons. (Admiral Nelson is safely dead at the and of this one.) And I’m eager for the next thrilling development.
Novik is up to 1807 I believe. Considering that her Supreme Bad Guy (thank you, Rinkworks) is Napoleon himself, she could write several more adventures before we get to Waterloo. She shows no sign of slacking off. So, how do writers keep things fresh, four years and five books into a series? Or seven books? Or even three?
I don’t know.
Check out the on-line reviews of Breaking Dawn. There are a lot of disappointed fans here. Now, not every fan is going to like every installment, but when that many ardent fans of the earlier books post negative reviews, it’s clear that something went wrong.
I read some excerpts from the first book, Twilight, and was not impressed enough to buy a copy of the book. A lot of kids liked it, and that was no skin off my nose. But I thought that they could do much better. So what happened?
From what little I remember from Twilight, there really wasn’t much to this story.Teenagers? Vampires? Werewolves? Been there, Buffied that. (I’m a huge Buffy fan). Aside from the well-worn premise, there was little substance or insight, in either the characters or the story itself. True, Stephenie Meyers might have been in a hurry, under pressure from her publishers. Or perhaps there just wasn’t much there there to begin with.
Since some people have, in all seriousness, compared Meyers with J.K. Rowling, I’ll mention a few things. It’s clear even in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone that this is more than just a kid’s story. There’s wry, satiric humor, genuine pathos, and terror. These are glimpses of greatness to come. Nothing in Meyers’s work comes close to this. I don’t remember any intentional laughs in Twilight. Now it looks likeher meager gift has burned itself out. Yet Rowling kept things up over the course of seven books.
Perhaps it depends on both the overall premise and the authors’s skill. Not to mention the author’s own investment in the story. Rowling once told an interviewer that she hated to kill Cedric Diggory, even though she knew it was vital to the story.Meyers, on the other hand, explains away her lapses by saying that in fiction, you can make your character do anything you want. No wonder the series ended with a thud.
Now check out Patrick Rothfuss’s wonderful The Name of The Wind. It’s only the first book in a trilogy, so I have no idea if Rothfuss can sustain things over two books, let alone three. But this first installmentis so vivid and written with so much brio that I have high hopes for the sequel (it comes out next April). There's also C.S. Mark's Elfhunter trilogy, another work written with energy and passion and deep affection for the chacaters and their story. I'm on the third book of this one, and it's the best entry so far.
The question is on my mind these days because I'm reading several series, as well as preparing the second installment of my own. Does it hold up? Writers are seldom the best judges of their own work, either for good or ill. I can only say, I hope so. Because I don't have the 'secret formula'. When it comes to writing, or pretty much anything, there's no such thing. Writers can only have faith in their work, and hope that it comes out right on the page.
It’s not possible for writers to keep their personal opinions out of their work. The finished product is a manifestation of who the writer is; unless you're a boring little blank with no strong feelings or opinions about anything, people will come away from your novel, or short story, with some idea of your favorite foods, whether you like to fish, whether you’re left or right of center, and so on.
A story where no character ever said anything or stood for anything would be deadly dull. In my own work characters make points all the time; frequently they’re countered by other characters. Sometimes they reach agreement, and sometimes not. Any reader would expect this in a story about a galactic war that features people from different planets trying to get along. Since I just want to tell a story, I try to avoid preaching; thus far I haven’t had any complaints about it.
When a book is written to Make a Point, it’s evident on every page. Characters tend to be one-dimensional, dialog is either cliched or sounds like a prepared speech, the situations are stock, and the reader knows fairly early on how this will end. The worst example of this in recent fiction is, of course, the Left Behind series. Messrs. Jenkins and LeHaye were so wrapped up in glorifying Christ and converting people that they forgot to tell a story. (Not that I buy for two seconds that anyone actually converted after reading this tripe).
Earlier this year I read a novel called Evolution’s Child, in which religious fanatics (Christians and Muslims, natch) are battling for control of the Earth. The moon is a religion-free, rational haven, with all the casual sex you could want. Of course all the fanatics want to destroy the place.
This book isn’t exactly bad, but it has all the classic features of a book written to Make a Point; I couldn’t remember the name of a single character from one day to the next, and it didn’t help that the dialog frequently sounded like a professor’s prepared lecture notes rather than spontaneous conversation. No religious people are moderates, or even happy in their faith. They’re all miserable, intolerant bigots. The atheist residents of the moon colony are just as bigoted and disrespectful of other people’s beliefs, but in the novel this is considered a good thing. It’s a shame, because there’s a compelling story here, but the author was so intent on Making a Point that he forgot about Telling a Story.
Not only can preaching turn people off, it’s also ineffective. I read a story once where the author felt compelled to include the breast-size in his description of every female character. I asked him about his breast-fetish; he explained that he wanted to show that small-breasted women can be beautiful, capable, smart, etc. Well, I already know that. Many people, even many men, know that. People who need to learn it aren’t going to learn it from any fiction. Everyone else will just wonder about the author’s fixation on breasts.
We can learn a lot from good fiction; the best, (works by Dickens, Robertson Davies, Ursula LeGuin, Umberto Eco, among hundreds) shows us new ways of looking at the world. We might even learn some interesting esoterica. But few people will drop their religious beliefs, or accept Christ as their personal savior, or appreciate small-breasted women just because some book says they should.
If you want to Make a Point or teach people something, write an essay, or offer to teach a class at the local community college. When you write fiction, stick to telling a story. If you do that well, any point you want to make will take care of itself.
