Re: Yeah, his writing annoys me greatly at times - Edit 1
Before modification by DomA at 25/01/2013 04:59:27 AM
Agreed. It isn't as "clear" as the best juvenile/YA fiction nor is it able to demonstrate a mastery of complex clauses. It feels like a barely-expanded screenplay more than anything else. Actually, that's too harsh on screenplays, as the better ones convey even without the actor emoting a greater clarity than many of Sanderson's scenes in his novels.
I've said so a few times before, but IMO he'd make a better scriptwriter than novelist. He's got a great sense of visual and a vivid imagination, and other qualities that would serve him well if he wrote for the screen. He'd need help to fix his dialogues, though.
It's so frustrating, because if he would put better effort into developing appropriate styles for the stories he writes, his fiction could go from "flawed execution of potentially good ideas" to something worth reading more than once. The Emperor's Soul I think is his best story conception, but even it falters due to the inattention to prose nuances. Frustrating.
I agree. His total disinterest in that aspect of his work a professed in interviews is frustrating.
Yes, it was jarring. Now I don't think of RJ as a master prose stylist, but at least his writing was consistent in terms of the effect he aimed to achieve. Trying to emulate even part of that didn't help Sanderson any, I'll grant. It read like Amateur Hour at times.
I know what you mean and I largely agree. It's strange on which aspects he chose to put efforts in and what he didn't. He's better in his own novels, though his work on WOT has started to show in his own work, and it's not necessarily a good thing.
He tried to adopt a descriptive style, but he never found a good balance. On average, his descriptions were two, three times as long as RJ's (overdone), and his use of them was terribly uneven. He'd spend way too many paragraphs describing a totally insignificant inn in Arad Doman (the setting for a single Cadsuane scene) in TGS, but then he'd go with chapters like the first in AMOL where he almost strips it all down to dialogue (a regression to his Elantris/Mistborn 1 days, which at this point can only be called "Brandon has a lazy day"
. It results in a very uneven book, with little care to harmonize the style or even story development. It's way too stretched one minute (eg: way too many Gawyn scenes in TGS. He used more scenes in TGS/TOM with him to finish a simple arc than RJ had used for the characters in the whole series. Way too many Androl scenes as well - a pure indulgence as he was the character Harriet let him do what he wished with, to the point the arc became totally predictable) then the next minute it's one baffling shortcut after another (after all the build up, he got the final battle at Cairhien offscreen, and even more oddly, he had the final battle at the BT happen off-screen. He did that a lot in the book, very stretched set ups, and then the conclusion happening off-screen. Very odd storytelling choices.). I know you don't think much of RJ's characterizations, but they rest heavily on inner thoughts during POVs (with frequent use of unreliable perception from the POV characters of the actions/thoughts of the others in the scene etc.). Brandon in key scenes deprived us completely of those, barely bothering with body language (it's like RJ's already limited palette was reduced to smiles and frowns. A lot of frowns) - making the motivations of the characters very confusing and vague. It's often all we had to follow them in RJ's books, and with Brandon it's just gone (and contrary to something you wrote elsewhere, it's very easy for the big WOT fans to recognize the voice of each character. With Brandon they read all the same, they're all generic and often out of character.
Now that we have hindsight of what RJ was planning for Mat, Brandon's execution of the transition between the Mat of KOD to a Mat who flees to hide in the skirts of his wife is appalling bad - unconvincing from start to finish.
He also needs to work on mastering the 3rd pers. limited POV. He keeps threatening to slide into omni all too often. It's like he doesn't fully understand the purpose of using that voice rather than omni.
Well, it reads much like contemporary American English in its social registers and use of verbs as nouns and vice versa. Doesn't make it good, but it does seem to appeal to those who speak in a similar fashion.
It's way too "modern" and colloquial for most Fantasy. It's one aspect of secondary worlds Sanderson still has a great deal to learn about.
Sanderson uses a register that in French would be used only to create a specific "naturalist"/realistic effect in a contemporary story. And even then, if a novelist used that level of written language anywhere but in dialogues or via a first person POV, he'd be thorn apart by reviewers.
Well, I guess he would be by anglophone reviewers too if he wrote mainstream literature.