The Wheel Turns, Part 1

A few days ago, I finished reading A Memory of Light, the 14th and final book in the Wheel of Time. I had very high hopes. This was it, after all. This was the end. I'll have to read it again to get a clearer picture of the various plot threads and resolutions - or lack thereof - for analytical purposes. But overall, my impression of the end of the series was...

It was all right.

First, some background. I first came across the Wheel of Time when, while visiting a distant relative, I was invited to look over their college-bound son's books. Among them, he'd collected nine intriguingly fat books - each one more than two inches thick - from the same epic fantasy series. (The entire series, at the time.) That alone said something. I borrowed the first one, found the opening a little slow, was sucked in after a few chapters and burned through it, all 305,000 words, in four or five days.

I was eleven.

Since then, I have collected the entire series, reading through most instalments at least three times - the first book seven times in all, I think. I could tell you, from memory, the story arcs of all the major characters; I could summarize the cultures and beliefs of all of the major kingdoms and factions. This series was what made me want to become an author. This was the story that made me want to write my own. 

But...

For all its vast scope and intricate plot threads, epic magic and sweeping battles, my love for the series has waned in recent years.

It isn't the widely-panned flaws. I read most of the Wheel of Time in my teens. Back then, I didn't know enough to recognize them as such. Although...

In hindsight, the characters did get rather caught up in their own side-quests for the middle third of the series, the 10th volume being the worst offender. Except for the ending, plotwise, the book is absolutely pointless. (It's also the one I liked the least. Could you tell?) The author did speed things up again in the 11th, the last book he completed before his passing, and definitely among the best in the series. But still. 

While annoying at times, I found the way gender differences are played up amusing, if unrealistic. Other people found it offensive. 

Though there's nothing sexually explicit in the series...all the spanking was pretty weird.

And why exactly did the hero have three true loves? At the same time. I never liked that.

Nor is it the fact that the last three books were largely written by a different author. Considering how vast this series is, with its multitude of plot threads and characters, he did a pretty good job - though it was annoying how he couldn't get one of my favorite characters right. 

No, at the end of the day, the reason I don't care so much about the Wheel of Time anymore is that I've outgrown it.

There was a time when I drank this stuff in like an alcoholic bathing in wine, ignoring any peculiarities in flavor for the high. (I don't like wine. That's just a metaphor.) But that was before I started writing myself. I enjoyed the final book a great deal; as an epic conclusion, it worked well.

 But there was a part of me that read much more critically, looking for lessons to learn and mistakes to avoid - and finding them. Sometimes a meaningful death is better than being saved at the very last minute (the prologue). Too many action scenes too close together dull their impact (the middle). And leaving elements of the ending intentionally vague can be frustrating (the ending, obviously).

There was an author, I forget who, who said that once you learn to read with a writer's eye, it never leaves you. You'll never read a book the same way again. And I suppose that's what's happened here. Some of the magic has been lost, now that I know how to make my own. 

The Wheel of Time turns, and legends fade...

So that this already prodigious post doesn't get even longer - though that would be a fitting tribute to the series - I'm splitting it in two. This first part focused more on the flaws, the places where the magic failed. The second will examine those elements of the story that I adored, that made me want to keep reading, and that I can still see in my own writing to this day.

The Wheel of Time was, after all, the first series I truly cared about. (My first love. Heh.) It will always hold a special place in my heart. It inspired me. I remember reading one of the later books a few years back and thinking, I could do this. 

I can't think of a better legacy than that.

No More Elves

I guess it was inevitable. Starting today, I will no longer be writing about elves.

(Actually a few days ago, but I'm milking the drama here.)

To clarify: I am excising all elves and elven references from my epic fantasy cycle, written and planned. My elven characters will now be human. Their culture, tree-motifs and all, is now a human culture. I'd thought of simply adding a few differences and renaming them something else. But that's stupid. A rose by any other name, and all that.

I am absolutely going to keep writing fantasy. Just not about elves. Why? Well...

A lot of reasons.

1) I wasn't writing much about elves anyway.

While they do did feature in my world's backstory, I killed most of them off long ago. The greater part of my rather ambitious epic has nothing to do with them. Heck, the fact that I never gave them a greater role says something in itself. Which leads to my second point...

2) I never made them my own.

I never developed them as a race, in other words. This is opposed to my other races, all of my own invention. (Though one or two are, admittedly, inspired from other sources. *coughangelscough*) Their cultures and histories and origins are all a part of the story, and are expanded upon accordingly. Their races, in and of themselves, matter.

I never did that for the elves. If you asked me what separates my 'own' races from humanity, I could give you my own answers. If you asked the same about the elves, all I could give you would be the same tired old shtick. They're long-lived, they like trees, yada yada yada. 

And none of that was even reflected in the story. Looking back, my elf characters had absolutely nothing personality-wise that distinguished them as elves - the pointed ears were just window dressing. This too is telling. My elven characters are three-dimensional personalities; I'm quite proud of them, really. It's just that those personalities barely had anything non-human about them. I didn't care enough to emphasize their elvenhood. 

Elvishness? Elvanity? Whatever.

And what references to their being elves I did include were unoriginal. Because let's face it...

3) Elves are cliché.

I confess. Remember how I killed off most of my elves in the backstory? Well, the few survivors were supposed to be holed up in - you guessed it - an ancient, hidden forest city that no one could get into uninvited. *hangs head in shame*

Seriously, though. George Martin had a point when he said that elves have been done to death. They've been around for centuries in myths and folklore, of course. But Tolkien popularized them, Dungeons and Dragons made them playable, and the Quendi blew up from there. 

By now, elves have been depicted as good, evil, noble, savage or morally ambiguous; they've been subdivided into high elves, wood elves, dark elves, wild elves, nomad elves, mountain elves, sea elves, and - I kid you not - space elves.

And all that's just from one author. Would you like some more examples? 

(I do apologize for relying so much on Wikipedia. There's only so much you can find on the internet.)

Like it or not, elves have become one of those things everyone thinks of when thinking of fantasy, along with dragons and edged weapons and wizards/mages/whatever-you-want-to-call-them. They're everywhere.

And that leads to my final and most important reason. Because I'm afraid that finding elves everywhere means that...

4) They no longer interest me.

I still like elves. Always have, probably always will. But these days, more often than not, seeing that a book contains elves will actually make me less likely to read it. Isn't it a cardinal rule that you should never write something you wouldn't want to read?

Nowadays, I'm looking for originality. (Aren't we all?) And even if another author has successfully made elves their own, I'm not sure I could forget that they come with a lot of baggage attached. (Unless they're funny. In that case, all bets are off.) I still think elves are cool, but they're also...quaint. Old-school. 

That's not a bad thing; far from it. But now that I'm older and wiser and somewhat jaded, when I see how many different viewpoints and societies and stories have been built around this one race...

I think I'd rather just make up my own.

Reading to Learn

A little while ago, I got a critique of my first book's prologue from a fellow writer via an online critique group. It was mostly laudatory; all smiles about that. But one comment of his got my attention. 

At one point, he noted that I use a lot of semicolons, and I use them correctly. But in his opinion, the average reader doesn't know the correct use of a semicolon. Their presence could thus make the text look awkward. In general, he simply writes two sentences rather than combining them in a way that might not be understood, and suggested I do the same.

Huh.

First, in case you didn't know. The semicolon is the following punctuation mark; see what I did there?

Now, let me clarify that isn't going to be a rant against the guy or anything. I respect his opinion, though I don't share it. He's not a bad writer. His story, what I've read of it so far, is pretty darn good. And he had a point regarding the sentence he commented on: it really did sound better split in two.

Nor is this going to be an impassioned defence of the semicolon, and its importance in written English. Stuff like that reminds me of the same things as fundamentalism: narrow-mindedness, and a desperate fear of change. I like using semicolons today, but I didn't always, and might not in future. It could be that in a hundred years the mark will be considered horribly arcane. Tastes change, as do languages. Such is life.

But. Growing up, I was mainly homeschooled. My education, such as it was, focused very little on the English language. One of my close cousins became an English teacher, and a lot of the time when she goes into grammatical terms, I won't know what she's talking about...until I get an example. Then, in most cases, I'll understand perfectly. So how is it that, lacking any formal education, I have mastered English grammar? How do I know how to use semicolons correctly?

Through reading.

I have always enjoyed reading; I've said that before. And allow me to state the obvious: the more you do something, the better at it you get. When I entered the second grade for my single year of school, I was already reading at a third-grade level. (They gave me a different book.) I remember seeing some of my classmates reading things like Dr. Seuss and thinking, you're still reading that? I got bored of that a lifetime ago. (Probably a year or two. You know how time crawls when you're young.) And if memory serves, I passed every spelling test with flying colors. (Math was a different story.)

My vocabulary also grew over the years. I've lost count of how many words I've learned from reading for pleasure - exacerbate, inebriated, remunerative, pedantic - simply because I saw them, didn't know what they meant, and had to look them up. Not sure if I could have done this for semicolons; I wouldn't have known what they were called. Maybe I just instinctively picked up that the pause was that of a colon + a comma. But I couldn't have learned about semicolons if I hadn't seen them in the first place.

Reading isn't just an eye-straining pastime. It taught me new words, new ways of linking them into chains of meaning. It helped me to better understand the English language as a whole.

And that is why I'm not going to stop writing semicolons. Because even - especially - if my readers don't know what one is and how it sounds...

They deserve the chance to learn.

Readers aren't stupid. If they were, they wouldn't be reading, and writing to ensure they understand what they read is not the same as assuming they won't. There's a fine line between clarity and condescension. Though it could be true that most will just skip over a word or symbol they don't know, at least a few will pause and wonder. I did. I even bothered to find out what they meant. I'd like to think I'm a better person because I did.

Maybe someone else will see something they don't understand in my work that makes them pause, and wonder.

Now, who knows what an ampersand is?

All Play and No Work...

Do you ever get the feeling that something you're doing for fun just isn't as fun as it should be? 

Now, this could be due to a lot of things. Overly high expectations, unwelcome distractions. Maybe you've never had sex before and you're expecting it to blow your mind. (It probably won't.) Maybe you've finally got time to read that novel, but your kids or your spouse or an annoying friend want you to spend it with them instead. (Relationships are at stake here.)

But let's assume that you, lucky you, are both fully focused on enjoyment and fully aware of how much you should expect. Yet the feeling that the pleasure is somehow undeserved lingers, drowning it out over time. That can't be right, can it?

It's probably time to get back to work.

For anyone who has managed to blur the lines between work and play to the degree of doing the same things for both: I salute you. I can't do that. For me, work, no matter how much I enjoy it, is still work. And pleasure, no matter how much 'work' is involved, is still pleasure. That's just the way it goes.

Even as a child I was aware of this. I remember watching a movie marathon - a lot of TV in one sitting, at any rate - around the age of twelve and getting restless after a few hours. So I got up and did some housecleaning. Then I sat down and watched some more, and it was fun again. Because I'd earned it.

That still holds true today. I can't do 'just for fun' things for too long. (Most of my pleasures are sedentary ones. But that includes things like walks in the park too - and not just due to fatigue.) I start getting the nagging feeling that my time could be better spent.

Maybe I have a guilt complex.

But I think this is normal, and even healthy. It seems to me that work and play are simply halves of a whole. What is the whole, you ask? Satisfaction.

Think about it. Each results in an opposing form thereof. One requires time and energy to produce; the other is immediate, but fades with repetition. Exactly what form the reward takes - money, experience, satiation - depends on the circumstance. How satisfied you are depends on your values and preferences. And the combination of the two, productivity and enjoyment, how much you fulfill needs and how much yours are fulfilled, is perhaps the most important element of our emotional well-being.

It's how much you like your life.

Of course, all this is just another way of saying something we've all heard time and again: balance is essential. But I can't help thinking that maybe the key to doing what you love is not needing a balance at all. You simply need to make work and play the same thing.

And again: I can't do that. Take this post, for instance. I enjoy writing. I enjoyed writing it. I am proud of the finished result. But because of all the time and effort I put into it - several hours, if you're wondering - I am still going to classify this as 'work'. What can I say. I've never been one to blur the lines.

But I know it can be done. And maybe that's enough.

So again, to all you special people living your dreams, and to all the others dreaming of living them, like I am:

Here's to you.

Now I'm going to go play a video game. I've earned it.

Passion

No, not that kind of passion. 

Though it could be, really. All kinds are included in what I'm talking about today, which is a definition I've only just realized. Passion is something you don't ever want to stop.

I was just reading the biography of Aitthipat Kulapongvanich, born in 1984, who dropped out of school in his teens to be an entrepreneur. He's currently the CEO of one of the most successful snack food companies in Thailand.

This guy's a billionaire.

A lot of good stuff in his story, but what caught my attention was that, despite all the hardships he went through, he never got tired of work. He was passionate about it.

And that reminded me of a quote by another, perhaps more famous business luminary.

You may have heard of him.

                                                                

Steve Jobs said that you have to be passionate about what you do with your life. If you're not, you won't have the perseverance to keep doing it against all odds. (I paraphrase.) 

And that, in turn, made me think. I want to be a writer, but am I passionate about it?

I could spin you a good argument that I am. 

I like reading. The written word has always entertained me. Whether flat or colourful, vibrant or dull, it remains a window into the thoughts, the minds...the worlds of others. I like stories. Experiences both real and fictional, that I long for, or would rather not share in truth, or those I had never even imagined. They interest me. 

And I like order. Writing is, at its heart, a weaving of thought and memory into a form others can understand - creating order from chaos. There is beauty in that.

All that sounds nice, doesn't it. But see, I'm good at making arguments. We all are - to ourselves if no one else. Yet the truth is that a lot of the time, at their core, our choices come down to our feelings. And when I sit down to write, I don't always have the right ones. I'll be bored, or distracted. Sometimes I'll give in and go do something else. 

But when I don't, sooner or later I'll feel it: the drive to keep going, to create something that is, in its purest form, an expression of myself, as well as the satisfaction that comes from doing so. And a part of me won't ever want to stop.

So think about it. What's your passion?