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rsadelleThis entry is part of a series.
They didn't call on me before the discussion moved on from how fan fiction has changed your reading habits to some other topic, so you get to hear about the other piece of my perspective on this (this is, after all, what a blog is for): I am much less tolerant of world-building and description now. When I read fic, I already know all of that, and I want to just get to the story part of the story. Now, even when I read original novels, I just want them to get to the story part of the story rather than spending forever and a day on setup. This is especially true of books in a series. I remember hearing that Lois McMaster Bujold's Beguilement and Legacy were originally one book that got split into two due to length, and it shows, especially when you compare Legacy to Passage, the third book. Passage resets the stage for us (although more gracefully and less tediously than other authors might) where Legacy just keeps going from where we left off in Beguilement. One of the worst - or possibly best - offenders is Catherine Asaro who seems to just copy and paste the same two paragraphs about how telepathy works in her world somewhere into the first chapter or two of each Skolian Saga novel. Bad because it's irritating; good because once you've read it in the first book, you can skip it every other time. (This relates to an interesting discussion from the bad books panel at last year's WisCon: one woman said she thinks we need to relearn the lost art of skipping. She contended that when you read letters and whatnot from people of the past [I have the impression of eighteenth or nineteenth century literary types, but that might not be who she meant], they were always skipping parts of books. She decided to take up this practice when she realized she'd been reading Anna Karenina for three years. She liked the Anna parts, but would get stuck at the other parts, and so she just started skipping the other parts.) Because of fan fic, and especially the matter-of-fact approach it takes to whimsical genres like wingfic, genderswap, and centaurfic (yeah, that last one is new to me too), I'd rather Catherine Asaro just tell the story without feeling like she has to give a sciency-sounding explanation for the telepathy. Similarly, I loved J.L. Langley's My Fair Captain, but found the blahblahblah about the Regency background of the society tiresome. Don't try to sell me on your world; just tell me the story. If you're any good at all (and J.L. Langley is), I'll pick up on the background as we go along.
"But Ruth," I can hear you thinking, "what about all that stuff you said six posts ago about not enough description?" Yeah, I did say all that stuff about not enough description. Somehow, there has to be a balance. I have to know enough to get what's going on, but not so much that I stop reading because there's no story amidst the description. There also has to be the right kind of description. Nathan first seeing Aiden? Yes. Regency background of their world? No.
They didn't call on me before the discussion moved on from how fan fiction has changed your reading habits to some other topic, so you get to hear about the other piece of my perspective on this (this is, after all, what a blog is for): I am much less tolerant of world-building and description now. When I read fic, I already know all of that, and I want to just get to the story part of the story. Now, even when I read original novels, I just want them to get to the story part of the story rather than spending forever and a day on setup. This is especially true of books in a series. I remember hearing that Lois McMaster Bujold's Beguilement and Legacy were originally one book that got split into two due to length, and it shows, especially when you compare Legacy to Passage, the third book. Passage resets the stage for us (although more gracefully and less tediously than other authors might) where Legacy just keeps going from where we left off in Beguilement. One of the worst - or possibly best - offenders is Catherine Asaro who seems to just copy and paste the same two paragraphs about how telepathy works in her world somewhere into the first chapter or two of each Skolian Saga novel. Bad because it's irritating; good because once you've read it in the first book, you can skip it every other time. (This relates to an interesting discussion from the bad books panel at last year's WisCon: one woman said she thinks we need to relearn the lost art of skipping. She contended that when you read letters and whatnot from people of the past [I have the impression of eighteenth or nineteenth century literary types, but that might not be who she meant], they were always skipping parts of books. She decided to take up this practice when she realized she'd been reading Anna Karenina for three years. She liked the Anna parts, but would get stuck at the other parts, and so she just started skipping the other parts.) Because of fan fic, and especially the matter-of-fact approach it takes to whimsical genres like wingfic, genderswap, and centaurfic (yeah, that last one is new to me too), I'd rather Catherine Asaro just tell the story without feeling like she has to give a sciency-sounding explanation for the telepathy. Similarly, I loved J.L. Langley's My Fair Captain, but found the blahblahblah about the Regency background of the society tiresome. Don't try to sell me on your world; just tell me the story. If you're any good at all (and J.L. Langley is), I'll pick up on the background as we go along.
"But Ruth," I can hear you thinking, "what about all that stuff you said six posts ago about not enough description?" Yeah, I did say all that stuff about not enough description. Somehow, there has to be a balance. I have to know enough to get what's going on, but not so much that I stop reading because there's no story amidst the description. There also has to be the right kind of description. Nathan first seeing Aiden? Yes. Regency background of their world? No.