The Misenchanted Post: Lessons Learned

As I was saying, I had fond memories of Lawrence Watt-Evans's The Misenchanted Sword and so I picked it up, thought maybe I'd write up a little scene summary and/or analysis on it ala Bickham. It suffices to say that I soon found I'd rather have dinner with Zombie Betty White than complete the exercise.

Here, Zombie Betty White does me a favor and eats the hand I turn pages with.

What I remembered:

• The story's protagonist, Valder, is on the run from the Northern Army
• He runs into a wizard that gives him a sword that makes him invincible in combat, BUT it has only 100 or so charges 
• The sword also makes him immortal. The catch is,
• After it runs out of charges, the sword will turn on him, and he'll die 
• If he doesn't use up the charges, he'll still get old and blind and cripply, so the immortality thing isn't as awesome as it seems. 

Cool, right?

Er ... well ... kinda. The first third of the book is okay -- while the first chapter is almost all exposition, he does eventually get the sword (yay!), and tests it against a series of foes where he learns how it works, where it doesn't, etc. Generally entertaining.

The middle is where things take a turn for the holyshithowinthehelldidImakeitthroughthis. At the end of Chapter 8 (p. 100), Valder has worked his way back to his army. It takes the next five chapters, fifty pages, for the camp wizards to test the sword and figure out its capabilities; sometimes Valder's helping out, otherwise he's just wandering around the camp. There is no action, and there is precious little conflict; it's just detective work. It's like if there was a forty-minute scene in Buffy where most of the time is spent with Buffy looking at random items in the stacks, checking back with Giles every couple minutes or so to help out.

(By the way, it took fifteen minutes to find that lame pic -- I was completely unsuccessful in finding a screen capture of the whole Scoobie Gang sitting in the library plotting and planning. I wonder why that is? Oh, right, because while those scenes are necessary -- and actually, I like them more than most -- NOTHING HAPPENS. They are, borrowing from Bickham, Sequel, not Scene.)

The worst part, though -- wait. I need to use a larger font. This is pretty bad.


The worst part ... 
At the end of the fifty-page waiting game, Valder is informed that whether he likes it or not, he's going to become an assassin for the Ethsahric army.

    "Let me rephrase that," Kelder said. "Within the next ten days you'll give Wirikidor [Valder's sword] the opportunity to kill the enemy's chief sorcerer on the western front." He smiled. "You're going to be very useful, Valder."

   Valder was not at all sure of that, but he did not argue. If assassination proved unbearable he could botch it, and they would reassign him. He found it impossible to believe that he was going to kill any sorcerers.

   Nine nights later, as he stood over the body of a dead sorcerer, he still found it hard to believe. 

Yes, that's right. Fifty pages where there's naught but plotting, planning, and preparation, so that we could get a one sentence summary of what happens in the next bit of action. 

I could be missing something, of course. Maybe this is an advanced writing technique. Let's see ...  

They lay still for a while. It was too dark to seek for cover, if indeed there was any to find; but Sam felt that they ought at least to get further away from the highways and out of the range of torchlight.

"Come on, Mr. Frodo!' he whispered. 'One more crawl, and then you can lie still.' With a last despairing effort Frodo raised himself on his hands, and struggled on for maybe twenty yards. Then he pitched down into a shallow pit that opened unexpectedly before them, and there he lay like a dead thing. 

Three weeks later, as Bilbo relaxed in Rivendell, drinking a cup of tea with Sam, he found it hard to believe that he had Gollum to thank for helping him destroy the One Ring.

Yeah, that works. Let's try another:

 "He runs it, Rorschach! Runs Pyramid Deliveries, Dimensional Developments, the whole show!"

"But Veidt was target." 

"I know it's crazy, and I don't want to believe it, but perhaps we should find Adrian fast. 'Karnak' ... Rameses built a gigantic hall there -- a monument. Karnak must be Veidt's Antarctic retreat. Better grab those papers from the desk ... it's a long journey ..." 

Later that afternoon, as Dan lay in Laurie's arms shortly after Veidt had killed half the population of New York with a teleported psychic alien-looking octopus, he wondered where Rorschach had run off to. Turns out that Doc Manhattan was vaporizing him.

See you in Shutter Island!

 Wow, writing is easy.

Now, I know what you're thinking. It's one thing to skip past his first assassination attempt, but it's not like we're going to skip all of them, and it's certainly not like he's going to have the world end off-screen.

Well, we skip all the assassination attempts, I'm afraid. And with regard to the world ending ... on p. 180, just as Valder is about to get a little tense with the running-out-of-charges thing, he hits a break: the gods themselves have ended the war:

"The gods have achieved in a single day what we could not in all these centuries of war! The Black City, capital of the [Northern] Empire, has been blotted from the face of the World, and the other northern cities lie in ruins or worse."

There is a downside, though.

"The eastern half of Ethshar - yes, fully half - was destroyed by the demonic invasion, and is now uninhabitable." 

So in the space of a page or two, we find out from a supporting character that there was a huge off-stage war between the Ethshar gods and the Northern Empire demons, and the gods won, but roughly half the world was destroyed or decimated. I'm not sure there's a better example of telling, not showing out there. 

Wrapping up: over the next 100 pages, and I admit I skimmed those FAST, Valder seems to wander around a bit, buy an inn, and eventually finds a hot wizard to cast a spell on him to make him young, and they get married and live happily ever after.

So. What is the lesson here? Is it simply that I was an idiot, but now that I have read many many writing books, and am more mindful about what I read, I am wise and thoughtful and can recognize trash?

It's really not.

The painful bits of Telling, not Showing aside, there's a reason that I like Watt-Evans's stuff:

• His characters sound like real people. They act and react like normal people -- often very matter-of-fact and low-key, and I like that. When Valder was told he had to become an assassin, he didn't go all pants-wetting nervous, or think about how he'd bring glory to his name, or save his country, or whatever -- he thought about it like a job, and if he decided he didn't like it, he'd tank it. It may not be "proper" from the point of view of building dramatic characters, characters that are supposed to have super-mega-strong wants and needs, but I don't care!

• I wasn't kidding when I said I like the Giles library scenes in Buffy. I heard that the writers thought they were death, and wanted the little bits of exposition to end as quickly as possible, but I don't mind some dithering and detecting when you're dealing with awesome magics. Why would you rush something like that? 

• There's a decent amount in there about different levels of magic spells, talking about how magic works, etc., and while these days I appreciate more of a character-driven story than one built around a Cool Magic System, I wasn't always this way; no doubt it appealed to the D&D geek in me.

• To my knowledge, his books eschew the horrendously cliched Chosen One meta-mega-uber-myth. Valder isn't secretly the son of a demigod. He's not the subject of some ancient prophesy. He's Just A Guy. 

As I previously noted, there's a ton to get right when you're writing, and just getting a quarter of it right is a huge accomplishment. Watt-Evans may have really blown some stuff in his first book, but he had enough juicy bits to keep me interested. And when it's so, so easy to focus on the juicy bits, and skip the nonsense -- well, why not?

It does make me wonder, though ... do other fantasy fans read like I used to read? Do they just skip the parts that bore them, and dig right into the meat? If so, all this pondering about being consistent in POV and such may be a bit pointless.

Here's where we get to the lesson that is both inspiring and depressing.

Inspiring: You can get published even when you're not hitting on all cylinders! Depending on your audience, you can get a long way with just a really interesting premise, even if your implementation isn't outstanding. Sometimes, getting it only 1/4 right is just fine.

Depressing: If you're not an outstanding author (or even if you are), perhaps you need an fantastic premise, or an exciting, awesome plot in order to pull in your readers -- which means that I should be focusing more on my complete lack of ability to create a story more than my complete lack of ability to tell a story. If in the genre, premise and plot are 90% of the puzzle, and writing skill is only 10%, then focusing on that 10% might be silly, if all one is looking to do is find readers.

Still, much more inspiring than depressing -- I want to write something that someone like the present-day me would like, not one The Young Grumpy Buddha would have liked.

A hundred years ago or so, I was at a con in the Midwest, and Lawrence Watt-Evans* was on one of the panels. Someone asked him the inevitable question of how long it takes to become a competent writer. He said that you needed to write every day, and accept that everything you write for the first eighteen months is going to be crap.

Wise words, even if he does occasionally kill millions of people off screen.

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*A year or three ago I read the Dragon Weather trilogy, by Watt-Evans; I don't recall loving the last one, but I definitely liked the first a lot. Given that this was after I entered my picky-trying-not-to-skim phase, my hunch is that millions of people and/or dragons do not die off screen in it, and that he's hitting on most cylinders. I'll have to pick it up again. I think The Misenchanted Sword was his first book -- it was published back in '85. I have a hunch he picked up a few things since then.