I've been thinking ...
Jan. 5th, 2003 07:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyabout Tolkien.
(![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky and jess79, this is book not movie, so you're safe.)
And what I've been thinking about is the terrible, terrible legacy Tolkien bequeathed to modern fantasy.
(Yes, I know. Roll your eyes. Mutter, "News from the file marked 'Duh.'")
Because, see, the thing that Tolkien does and makes look so fucking EASY when it's actually the grand high bitchkitty of bitchkittitude *takes deep breath* is travel narrative.
Travel narrative is HARD. It's BORING. It sucks beyond the telling of it. And then you read Tolkien, and it looks so damn easy and it's so fascinating, and there are pages and pages of my beloved, battered edition of LotR that are covered with metaphorical tear stains, because he can do that and I just fucking can't.
And a lot of other people can't, either.
Now, there are plenty of things that Tolkien doesn't do well--or, rather, there are things that Tolkien doesn't care about and therefore doesn't really do. And there are Issues with his prose style that I'm not going to go into right now. But what he does so beautifully and powerfully is take a quest narrative and USE it like there's no other possible way to tell a story and what are you footling around with other narrative structures for anyway?
There's a term for what I'm talking about here, this horrid covered pit of a trap; in the Renaissance they called it sprezzetura, and it's the art of doing something really difficult as if it were easier than breathing. Inigo and Westley are indulging in massive sprezzetura in their swordfight in The Princess Bride, and it's what takes my breath away about really good figure-skating or dancing. That's what Tolkien has with travel narrative, and that's why, for him, the quest narrative was the right choice.
Enter untold teeming masses of would-be writers who read Tolkien and think, I can do that!
Well, sunshine, here's the thing. You can't.
I've never read a fantasist who can write travel narrative the way Tolkien can. (If anyone has, that's what the "post reply" thingy is for, okay?) And the thing about quests (as DWJ points out in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland) is that you end up visiting every country on the damn map, some of 'em twice. And if you don't have an innate gift for travel narrative--or you're not prepared to work really, really hard to get it right--then, behold and marvel, you've written a boring book that readers such as myself may get through once but will never be bothered to read again. And if that doesn't upset you, then you are not, frankly, the kind of writer I want to read anyway.
Moreover, not only does the fantasy market get flooded with bad Tolkien imitations, but we also get locked into this idea that "fantasy=quest," and frankly I think the genre is weakened and made poorer by it.
Yes, I'm overgeneralizing. Yes, there are plenty of fantasy authors who DON'T do quests. But the big names--the books that mold the popular conception of what fantasy is FOR--are all quest-y types, all doing Tolkien to one degree or another. (I suppose Charles de Lint is the honorable exception, but I have reservations about Charles de Lint that I'm not going to go into here.) And so all the other things that fantasy could be used to explore and expose are left-handed stepchildren, competing desperately with each other for the slivers of attention left over from the blue-eyed child, Quest.
My point, I suppose, is that there ARE other narrative structures and they DO work in fantasy. Tolkien makes it hard to see that, because he makes his quest structure look so obvious, so easy. I must have started four (five? uncountable squamous, eldritch, sniggering horrors?) quest novels as a teenager, just because I didn't know any other way to write a book that had magic in it. Mind you, those novels would have been dreadful anyway, but I wouldn't have been so bored and frustrated by the learning process if I'd been able to think outside the Tolkien-box.
Tolkien was a genius. The rest of us mostly aren't. Which is why we'd be better off if we left Tolkien to be Tolkien and sought out different templates for story-telling. Good writing does not come from playing to somebody else's strengths.
And now I want to go read LotR again.
(
papersky and jess79, this is book not movie, so you're safe.)And what I've been thinking about is the terrible, terrible legacy Tolkien bequeathed to modern fantasy.
(Yes, I know. Roll your eyes. Mutter, "News from the file marked 'Duh.'")
Because, see, the thing that Tolkien does and makes look so fucking EASY when it's actually the grand high bitchkitty of bitchkittitude *takes deep breath* is travel narrative.
Travel narrative is HARD. It's BORING. It sucks beyond the telling of it. And then you read Tolkien, and it looks so damn easy and it's so fascinating, and there are pages and pages of my beloved, battered edition of LotR that are covered with metaphorical tear stains, because he can do that and I just fucking can't.
And a lot of other people can't, either.
Now, there are plenty of things that Tolkien doesn't do well--or, rather, there are things that Tolkien doesn't care about and therefore doesn't really do. And there are Issues with his prose style that I'm not going to go into right now. But what he does so beautifully and powerfully is take a quest narrative and USE it like there's no other possible way to tell a story and what are you footling around with other narrative structures for anyway?
There's a term for what I'm talking about here, this horrid covered pit of a trap; in the Renaissance they called it sprezzetura, and it's the art of doing something really difficult as if it were easier than breathing. Inigo and Westley are indulging in massive sprezzetura in their swordfight in The Princess Bride, and it's what takes my breath away about really good figure-skating or dancing. That's what Tolkien has with travel narrative, and that's why, for him, the quest narrative was the right choice.
Enter untold teeming masses of would-be writers who read Tolkien and think, I can do that!
Well, sunshine, here's the thing. You can't.
I've never read a fantasist who can write travel narrative the way Tolkien can. (If anyone has, that's what the "post reply" thingy is for, okay?) And the thing about quests (as DWJ points out in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland) is that you end up visiting every country on the damn map, some of 'em twice. And if you don't have an innate gift for travel narrative--or you're not prepared to work really, really hard to get it right--then, behold and marvel, you've written a boring book that readers such as myself may get through once but will never be bothered to read again. And if that doesn't upset you, then you are not, frankly, the kind of writer I want to read anyway.
Moreover, not only does the fantasy market get flooded with bad Tolkien imitations, but we also get locked into this idea that "fantasy=quest," and frankly I think the genre is weakened and made poorer by it.
Yes, I'm overgeneralizing. Yes, there are plenty of fantasy authors who DON'T do quests. But the big names--the books that mold the popular conception of what fantasy is FOR--are all quest-y types, all doing Tolkien to one degree or another. (I suppose Charles de Lint is the honorable exception, but I have reservations about Charles de Lint that I'm not going to go into here.) And so all the other things that fantasy could be used to explore and expose are left-handed stepchildren, competing desperately with each other for the slivers of attention left over from the blue-eyed child, Quest.
My point, I suppose, is that there ARE other narrative structures and they DO work in fantasy. Tolkien makes it hard to see that, because he makes his quest structure look so obvious, so easy. I must have started four (five? uncountable squamous, eldritch, sniggering horrors?) quest novels as a teenager, just because I didn't know any other way to write a book that had magic in it. Mind you, those novels would have been dreadful anyway, but I wouldn't have been so bored and frustrated by the learning process if I'd been able to think outside the Tolkien-box.
Tolkien was a genius. The rest of us mostly aren't. Which is why we'd be better off if we left Tolkien to be Tolkien and sought out different templates for story-telling. Good writing does not come from playing to somebody else's strengths.
And now I want to go read LotR again.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-01-05 07:39 am (UTC)But you're right, generally, I think.
The really odd thing, I think, is how much there is of Tolkien that nobody has really copied -- a lot of things in the Silmarillion that are not like history because history didn't have immortal elves, and a lot of things mentioned in LOTR.
I live in fear that when Christopher Tolkien dies, the estate will authorise people to write all the stories mentioned in "The Tale of Years" and they won't authorise people I'd trust to do it, like Guy Kay and, um, me, but instead Terry Brooks and Kevin J. Anderson and the like, and I still won't be able to put my Eowyn poems on my web page but other people will be allowed to trample all over Middle Earth with flat and uncaring feet.
And they still won't be able to avoid travel writing and quests.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-05 08:46 am (UTC)Oh thanks. Now I'm going to be stuck with THAT horrible thought in my head all day. I feel ill and unclean.
You're right about LeGuin. I don't think of her as doing travel narrative, but of course that's exactly what she does. That's what The Left Hand of Darkness IS.
*smacks stupid self upside the head*
She comes at it from a very different angle than Tolkien, which I expect is why I didn't think of her. Her books are always so densely psychological that the travelling becomes, for me, subsumed in the psychology. The characters HAVE to make these physical journeys in order to make the necessary psychological journeys that are the deep subject of their story, and so I think I kind of forget that the travelling is physical. But Genly Ai's trip across Orgoreyn (to pick one small example) is the sort of travel narrative that SHOULD be excruciatingly boring and yet is fascinating, even on the fifth or sixth reread. And that's not even something I would point to as one of the book's "good bits."
So, yes. Tolkien and LeGuin. And she's a genius, too.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-05 10:32 am (UTC)To pick up on just one of your many threads... One of the underlying reasons that Travel/Quest works for Tolkien is that, as you suggest with your DWJ paraphrase, there's a World through which to travel. If I'm going to visit these countries, I don't want it to be like driving Indiana backroads where the small towns all look the same. Because Tolkien created fifteen languages -- and, handy bonus, the cultures that go with them -- we can get the sense of travelling not merely over landscape but through places that feel vastly different. Middle-Earth has incredible scope, and every bit of it has been not just imagined but mapped (both metaphorically and literally). Without that, the whole thing's just one long backyard stroll.
And, of course, the world-builing is one of the other things that LeGuin gets so right.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-05 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-01-05 07:01 pm (UTC)Which is kinda the point of that series as much of his journey is intenal as well as external, but if you (universal) don't have a reason besides caring what happens to him, or alternately, wishing to see him die a painful fiery death, then it makes for hard going.
On the other end is Elizabeth Moon's "The Deed of Paksenarrion" has a delightful main character, along with a really compelling world, that is much more recognizably drawn from Tolkien, of her own.
And yeah, neither of these authors can so much as breathe the same air as Tolkien when it comes to writing quest narrative, but they are interesting enough in the world building areas, and they both do have quest narratives of their own...so I'm bringing them up, just in case you haven't read these particular tales. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 03:42 am (UTC)I just finished reading your novels and one of the things I enjoyed most about them (Melusine specifically) was the travel narrative. I find it very fascinating that you found that aspect difficult to write becuase it SOLD me, hands down, and "travelbond" (as I like to call it) is a narrative kink of mine so I am particular about it.
Will there be more travelbond in Corambis? ::hopes hard::