L.B.: The Longest Day

Left Behind, pp. 227-308

The pattern in Left Behind is to skip back and forth between our dual heroes, so having just completed a scene with Buck, we're about to get to a Rayford scene. This is a common tactic in an story involving multiple protagonists and I don't think there's any one single way of doing this right.

There are, however, ways of doing this wrong, and this being LB, our authors have managed to find such a way.

By "wrong" I mean switching back and forth, arbitrarily and arrhythmically, in such a way that the reader is confused about when and where the action is taking place. These scenes do not need to follow a symmetrical, linear pattern, but if Mr. Smith is flying all over the world over the course of several months, then readers will be a bit confused if this account is interspersed with scenes of Mr. Jones in which he is always in his living room at 3 o'clock on Thursday.

Here's a rough timeline of the first full Monday of the Apocalypse:

1. Morning, Buck at JFK international arrivals (after a red-eye from Germany and breezing through customs with a fake passport).

2. Morning, Rayford & Chloe en route to O'Hare.

3. Morning, Buck & Steve at JFK and Central Park (trip from airport to midtown takes about 10 minutes).

4. Midday, Rayford & Chloe in Atlanta.

5. Afternoon, Buck & Steve at the U.N. for Nicolae's big speech.

6. "Rush hour late Monday afternoon," Rayford & Chloe touch down at O'Hare.

7. Afternoon, Buck & Steve at Nicolae's post-speech presser.

8. Evening, Rayford at home. He has driven from the airport to the suburbs, stopping for groceries on the way in less than an hour.

9. Evening, Buck & Steve at Buck's apartment.

10. Evening, Rayford & Chloe drive to the church, go shopping at Best Buy, and return home to talk to Hattie on the phone.

11. 11 p.m., Buck & Steve catch a cab to the Potters in time for Nightline at 11:30.

12. 11:30 p.m. in New York, 10:30 in Illinois, where Rayford & Chloe watch Nightline.

13. Tuesday, about 12:30 a.m., Buck & Steve at the Plaza.

14. Monday, about 11:30 p.m., Rayford & Chloe at home.

15. Tuesday, until about 1:30 a.m., Buck & Nicolae at the Plaza.

16. Monday into early Tuesday, Rayford & Chloe at home.

17. Tuesday, about 2 a.m., Buck returns to his apartment.

So that's 17 scenes played out over 81 pages, during which we have a half-dozen cab rides and phone calls, and we encounter law enforcement officials from four different agencies. But for all of that, surprisingly little happens.

The authors of novels don't have to worry about building sets for every scene, like they would if this were a movie, and they don't have to worry about scene changes, like they would if this were a play. Despite this luxury, it's still good for novelists to learn from the necessary economies of filmmakers and stage managers.

Several of the above scenes are redundant -- the sort of thing that wouldn't even pass muster as bonus material for a DVD. When looked at scene-by-scene in this way, it becomes clear that Left Behind is a published first draft. The authors didn't bother with any rewriting. They never even bothered with re-reading. Respect for craft and respect for your audience go hand in hand. Likewise, disrespect for craft and disrespect for your audience go hand in hand. The 81 pages outlined above ought to have been reduced to 40 or even 30 pages. It would have been easy.

Anyway, I needed to write out the timeline above for my own sake, to keep me from getting lost (like the authors did) in this Long Monday. Consider this one more entry in the vast catalogue of the many different ways in which Left Behind fails as a piece of writing.

Comments

[Sarah Dylan Breuer]

Hey, if to God a thousand years is as a single day, is it so surprising that authors as close to God as LaHaye and Jenkins (they'd have to be AMAZINGLY close to God, wouldn't they, to know all about matters of which Jesus said, "no one knows the day or hour") seem to think they can pack a thousand years of flights, cab trips, and seven-hour bathroom breaks into a single narrative day? Or that they can make even ten minutes of reading their books seem like at least a month?

[DD]

Reminds me of 24

[Vermic]

One thing I've been wondering about is, have our two protagonists officially met each other at this point? I know Buck was on Rayford's plane when the Event hit, but I don't know if Rayford's perfunctory address to the remaining passengers really counts. So far, Hattie appears to be the only thing these two men have in common.

When Buck and Rayford finally meet, I wonder whether they'll remember each other from the plane. "Hey, you were that guy who chopped up his seat phone!"

Topic? Multiple protagonists. Lord of the Rings: after the Fellowship splits up, Tolkien spends half of the second book with one group, and the other half exclusively with the other, then back to the first group in the next book. The films go with the more standard back-and-forth "ten minutes with these guys, then ten minutes with these other guys" structure. For my money, both methods worked fine.

[Fraser]

As someone who's been working very hard trying to synchronize the timelines for the book I'm working on, well said!

[Geds]

For my money, both methods worked fine.

The point is, though, you have to know what you're doing. I'm partial to the, "new chapter, different character," style of dealing with the problem. It allows for cliffhangers and whatnot to keep the story moving and keep the reader interested.

But if you're just doing it for the sake of doing it, well, that's bad writing.

Meanwhile, I think Tolkien did the half and half break thing simply because it was really hard to keep track of time specifically and everybody was doing things that required long, fixed times of action. That works, too, but it leads to the possibility of more "downtime."

[Ken]

When looked at scene-by-scene in this way, it becomes clear that Left Behind is a published first draft. The authors didn't bother with any rewriting. They never even bothered with re-reading. Respect for craft and respect for your audience go hand in hand. Likewise, disrespect for craft and disrespect for your audience go hand in hand. The 81 pages outlined above ought to have been reduced to 40 or even 30 pages. It would have been easy. -- Slacktivist

It's 22 NaNoWriMos, that's what.

That sort of "diahrrea-writing" made sense in Thirties-era Pulp, when pulp-mag deadlines meant little or no rewriting/polishing; when speed meant volume and volume meant income and income meant survival during the Great Depression.

It does not make sense now. Especially for The Great Christian Crossover Best-Seller, when you should be putting your absolute best into the shop window. THIS is what the mainstream will think of when they hear the phrase "Christian Fiction".

Multiple protagonists. Lord of the Rings: after the Fellowship splits up, Tolkien spends half of the second book with one group, and the other half exclusively with the other, then back to the first group in the next book. The films go with the more standard back-and-forth "ten minutes with these guys, then ten minutes with these other guys" structure. -- Vermic

Actually, the "standard back-and-forth" became the current standard because of film.

Prof. Tolkien's "half the book with one group, then the other half exclusively with the other" is an older structural tradition, prevalent (along with extremely slow pace and frequent digressions) in Victorial-era fiction. LotR also has several artifacts from publishing:
1) It is NOT a "trilogy" in the sense of being a series of three related novels. It is one continuous epic so long it had to be published in three volumes, what Kipling called "A Three-Decker".
2) Prof. Tolkien actually divided it up into SIX books; the original publisher bound two of Tolkein's "books" in each volume. So, under the author's original structure, he "spent one book with one group, and the next book with the other" after the Fellowship broke at Rauros Falls.

[Geds]

Gracias, Ken.

That's deeply informative.

[Jos]

You know, it's a shame nobody converted to RTC-ism today, because then you'd be able to make some lame gag like

"7:00 PM - Rayford, Hellbound Sinner, Horrible Father, Cheating Husband

7:05 PM - Rayford, Redeemed Heavenbound Christian And All-Around Wonderful Human Being"

Come to think of it, I've frequently said LB God's a jerk, but he's got some pretty low requirements when it comes to the redemption of souls. I'm not really sure that's a good thing, though.

[Bugmaster]

I think that George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire does an excellent job of creating a "multi-threaded" narrative. In it, each chapter is told from a point of view of a different character. Occasionally, the same characters are observing the same events, and let me tell you -- a jousting match at a tourney as seen by a spoiled princess looks very, very different when seen by a seasoned politician. This technique really helps to flesh out the characters, and to make them feel human in a way that LH&J could never imagine (I bet they don't even see real humans as humans, huh). All the character threads in Song of Ice and Fire are woven into each other, and even when they don't meet, they contribute to a strong feeling of dramatic irony, as you keep thinking, "oh, if only they knew...".

[aunursa]

This pattern continues throughout the series, It becomes especially irritating in the latter books, when the arbitrary rotation is expanded to include not only Rayford and Buck, but also the trib force's undercover operative in Carpathia's headquarters, as well as other trib force members on various missions.

It is this very technique that Jenkins uses in his feeble attempt to produce a cliffhanger the final pages of Book 11 (Armageddon). He alternated short scenes between Rayford and Buck, both of whom are gravely injured. The scene then switches briefly to another character for a single line, then back to either Rayford or Buck, but only using pronouns (i.e. the books ends with, "he fell limp and died.")

[the opoponax]

in addition to being obviously a published first draft, i think another key editorial problem (which i've noticed in the Harry Potter series and other popular fiction recently) is that the publishers like to put out books that are substantial in size and length. i guess they want people to feel like, if they're spending $30 on a hardcover edition, they're getting their money's worth. or maybe there's some kind of marketing strategy where people are more likely to purchase thicker, longer books because they feel accomplished reading them (i think this is a major factor in Potter -- 12 year olds feel extremely cool saying they just read a book that was 1000 pages long). this sort of thing involves lots and lots of padding in the storyline, unless you really and truly do have 1000 pages worth of things to say. which clearly Jenkins does not.

it's the reverse problem from a film, where usually the filmmaker is trying to fit a big chunk of story into a limit of only 90 minutes or 2 hours. so where a bad movie will make no sense because half the scenes have been cut and the whole story is told in voiceover, a bad novel will have pages and pages where nothing happens because the book deal said 450 pages, and so they are gonna submit that 450 pages, godammit!

[the mocaw]

I wonder if it's bad that I've started thinking of these weekly blogs as "slacktivist's writing lesson for aspiring young authors."

It reminds me of what a writing teacher once told me about old and new school storytelling.

- Old school:

Harry nodded. "I'd better get to Frank's house right away."

(Fifteen pages of Harry getting in his car, driving over, stopping at a stoplight, and descriptions of traffic at rush hour and the problem of urban decay, which will never be touched upon again in the novel)

- New School

Harry nodded. "I'd better get to Frank's house right away."

***

"FRANK, YOU JERK!!!!!" Harry shouted.

[Cathy]

I guess the Chicago-Atlanta-Chicago day trip is kind of feasible - if they spent only a short time on the ground in Atlanta; the time zone shift will cancel out. Looks like about a 2-hour nonstop flight (unlike L&J, I'm familiar with the concept of 'research'), plus an hour trapped in the airport at each end of each flight...

but I agree with DD that all in all it sounds like 24, where Jack Bauer has the superpower to never get stuck in Los Angeles traffic. An hour from O'Hare to the suburbs including a stop for groceries, like hell...

[Ken]

This is somewhat off-topic for the week, but I just came across
this article at The Wall Street Journal's website which has IMHO a lot of bearing on the general subject of Left Behind and RTCs.

Titled “Christianity Without Salvation”, it is a retrospective on the 100th anniversary of the “Social Gospel” idea in mainstream Protestant churches. (An idea which I suspect Slack and many of this blog's readers lean towards; I myself experienced its extreme "Social Justice" offshoot in the early Eighties.)

What I read into this passage in the essay –

Yet even a brisk reading of Rauschenbusch's work suggests crippling weaknesses, at least from the standpoint of faith. We're told that the larger social message of Jesus' teaching--especially his concern for the poor--was sidelined by the cultural assumptions of his followers. The culprits: the doctrine of sin and the "crude and misleading" idea of a coming apocalypse. Generations of believers wrongly came to regard earthly life as a snare and turned inward for personal salvation.

– was a split in American Christian thinking. Like the two Captain Kirks from that transporter accident in Old Testament Star Trek. While the “Social Gospel” of mainstream churches went one way, it spawned a Fundamentalist movement which went completely the other way, into tunnel-vision and obsession on “the doctrine of sin and the … idea of a coming apocalypse … turning inward for personal salvation”.

In one corner, “Christianity Without Salvation”.
In the other, a Christianity that is ONLY Personal Salvation. (i.e. "Don't be Left Behind!")
And Christ Himself stuck in No Mans' Land between the rows of trenches, taking friendly fire from both sides.

[aracne]

I concurr with the Song of Ice and Fire suggestion. It is the best narrative of this kind I've ever seen. What makes it so good is that time always goes forward with each chapter, and even if the narration is on the other side of the world, you know that things are happening that are not being told. On later chapters the characters talk about them like they have been in them or the narrator sumarizes them at the beggining of the chapter (the characters are alive even if you are not looking...).

I love this idea. It is very easy to follow the action even with multiple narrators, as you only need to center "where" the action is taking place. I recomend you to read at least the first one to see how neat the effect is (the story is a little dark, though).

[Ken]

so where a bad movie will make no sense because half the scenes have been cut and the whole story is told in voiceover, a bad novel will have pages and pages where nothing happens because the book deal said 450 pages, and so they are gonna submit that 450 pages, godammit! -- Opponax

Even if you have to pop in a DVD of Zulu and plagarize the movie scene-by-scene to pad out those 450 pages! (Actual case, S.M.Stirling, Island in a Sea of Time trilogy.)

And in F&SF these days, that "450 pages" is for EACH volume of THE TRILOGY! (A requirement originating in LotR's publication as a three-decker...)

[Bugmaster]

Yes, but IMO the opening chapter of the first book is a bit botched... It reads too much like a fantasy cliché . That's a very minor complaint, though; and, to be fair, the chapter does help to establish the overall mood of the book (which I'd describe as "acute paranoia mixed with foreboding", heh).

[Bugmaster]

Er, my comment above was in reference to Song of Ice and Fire. Another book with a multithreaded narrative is C.J.Cherryh's Cyteen, but SotF pulls it off better, IMO. Cyteen is still a great book though, because it actively corrupts your very way of thought -- and how many books can claim that ?

[Geds]

I wonder if it's bad that I've started thinking of these weekly blogs as "slacktivist's writing lesson for aspiring young authors."

Funny you mention that. I had a sci-fi book sitting on my laptop for years that I assumed was never going to go anywhere because it wasn't right somehow. When I started reading Fred's stuff I realized that I'd skimped out on the world-building and there were certain ideas that just didn't make any sense.

Now I'm actively going back and adding in some stuff to better explain how things work and probably massively re-writing a couple chunks.

It's something that I now refer to as a "rookie mistake." You get so excited about the "meat" of the piece you're writing that you forget you need to cook it first. After that you can't skimp on the presentation, either (y'know, editing). Nobody wants (I would assume) a chunk of raw meat plopped down on a paper plate.

The bizarre thing is that Fred is making us aware that the LB books are little more than a collection of rookie mistakes that seem to have sold 65 million copies. It makes me want to cry.

It also makes me question the sanity of anyone who would pay money to join the Christian Writer's Guild. I would really like to see statistics with ratios of members to published writers. And I'm not talking about Xulon or the other vanity presses that charge a thousand bucks for the privilege. I mean major publishers that pay the author for rights.

Although that would be an interesting secondary statistics: the ratio of authors taken in by the Christian Writers Guild to authors taken in by vanity presses. There's always been a cottage industry built around duping aspiring writers. Somehow I think it's even easier to dupe aspiring Christian writers...

[chaos_engineer]

I'll put in a plug for Tad Williams' "Otherland" series. It's a fairly light adventure story about people trapped in virtual reality...but at any given point, he's bouncing back and forth among half-a-dozen groups of protagonists, and every single point-of-view switch comes at a cliffhanger. (I lost a lot of sleep reading it, because there was always at least one pending cliffhanger that I wanted to see resolved. The series is four thick volumes.)

[Burke]

Thanks for this great commentary and analysis and a great blog to boot.

I gave you a shout out in my most recent post.

[Erick Oppeen]

I agree with my learned friends' comments in re. Song of Ice and Fire and S.M. Stirling---while I loved Island in the Sea of Time, I thought the third book in the series felt like he'd gotten tired of the whole thing and wanted to wrap it up.

[Mike Timonin]

Re: Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling proves that kids will read books of considerable length, allowing other YA authors to publish their work as a single text instead of trilogies or quatrologies or what have you. So says Tamora Pierce, one of said YA authors.

[Izunya]

So maybe---probably---this has been covered already, but this post brings up a point that I have been wondering about for a while. Namely, what the frell happened to L&J's editors?

I mean, I'm not a particularly experienced writer, but I've published two short stories. From my limited experience, if something doesn't make sense, or doesn't ring true, or has the potential to bore a reader, a magazine editor will stay on your case until you fix it. And no detail iis so small that they'll just let it slide. One of my editors went as far as sending me graphics of what I'd described: "Okay, this is how it looks in my head. Now explain to me how on earth someone can see the sky from the bottom of that staircase?"

Not a major plot point. A staircase.

And for the record, although I didn't particularly enjoy doing the revisions, my story was much better for it and I knew it. All writers need editors. They tell you when the words don't match what's going on in your head.

So, could someone please tell me how L&J managed to get published without their editor ever sending them an e-mail (or a letter, this was a while ago) saying, "Look, Nicolae's speech doesn't work. I need a rewrite of pages this through that." Or, "Why did they go to Atlanta? Can you rewrite this scene for Chicago?" How, in short, did they get published without doing any rewriting whatsoever? Does the Christian publishing industry have editors? Inquiring minds want to know.

Izunya

[Paula]

It all kind of reminds me of Cartman when he decided he was going to form a Christian Rock band (Faith+1)
From Wikipedea:
"When the other boys kick Cartman out of their band, "Moop", for suggesting that they play Christian rock, Cartman forms his own group to make music for Jesus not for spiritual rewards, but to profit from the wide audience for this kind of music. Cartman and Kyle bet each other $10 that their respective band will be the first to go platinum by selling one million records...

...Cartman, Butters and Token (who, according to Cartman, can play bass because he is black) have rocketed to the top of the Christian rock charts, with Cartman simply tweaking the lyrics of love ballads to include Jesus' name. It turns out to be extremely successful."

[LMM]

Izunya -- Well, in the case of Robert Jordan (an example of a good story that's been turned into extruded fantasy prose by excessive detail), the general consensus is that he's literally sleeping with his editor (== his wife), but I don't think there's a chance of that happening for L&J.

I'm honestly not sure how you can explain them, really.

[LMM]

And for those of you who read the book -- why exactly do R&C fly to Atlanta through O'Hare for less than a day? Is there really anything that urgent for them to do?

I'm morbidly curious at this point; I would like to know.

[Abelardus]

Occasionally, the same characters are observing the same events ...

That reminded me of Akira Kurosawa's storytelling technique in Rashomon with the various characters relating -- for lack of a better term -- what they saw take place during one event; it'd follow in a similar vein, wouldn't it?

[rivikah]

My local public library has a number of reading suggestions posted on their webpage. You find an author you know you already like and clicking on their name gives you a list of recommended books you might like. In most cases, the author that you clicked will not show up on the list. The goal is to expand your horizons right?

But if you click "Tim LaHaye" You get a list of all of the Left Behind titles. The other lists rarely include the author's own books. This list contains only the author's own books.

I don't know what it means (There are no comparable books? If you like these we can't help you? We're afraid to recommend something that might offend you?) but I thought it was interesting.

[Jeff]

it's the reverse problem from a film, where usually the filmmaker is trying to fit a big chunk of story into a limit of only 90 minutes or 2 hours.

I've seen a lot of the other side of this as well -- movies padded out so they fit the new standard of 2 hours (when 90 minutes used to be more than enough to tell a story). Almost every movie will have some scenes which add nothing to the story and leave me (at least) thinking "Come on... let's go back to the STORY.".

Nobody wants (I would assume) a chunk of raw meat plopped down on a paper plate.

Of course not. We want steaming piles of produce drenched in butter!!!!

[the opoponax]

those recommending books with multiple narrators:

i believe you want to start with Louise Erdrich's Tracks, which is pretty much the originator of the idea in recent literary memory. i.e. she's probably not the first ever to do it, but Tracks is definitely the inspiration for just about every recent attempt. it's one of the books you're inevitably assigned first semester of freshman year at any liberal arts college in the US. i would be shocked if there were many published novelists with any pretension to literary accomplishment who haven't read it or at least heard of it. it predates all the works mentioned in this thread by at least a decade or so, except for Cyteen which came out the same year, interestingly enough.

regarding the lack of editing in L&J: it seems to be a recent phenomenon that pulp-ish writers who can be assured of selling zillions of books on name recognition alone (Chricton, Grisham, King, Rice, Patterson, Rowling, etc.) basically don't have editors nowadays, or at least not editors who aren't total sycophants. combining that with the need for the big fat books that adhere to that original 750 page agreement in the book deal, you get the excesses of L&J.

wanna know a secret? most people in publishing, and definitely almost everyone in the genres, actually doesn't care whether the books are good or not. what they care about is the sales figures. if they can be certain that a title will sell based on something like name recognition, being a lot like a similar book that was a huge bestseller last year (see every Chick Lit book ever published since Bridget Jones), being part of a franchise, etc, that's enough for them.

[Ken]

So, could someone please tell me how L&J managed to get published without their editor ever sending them an e-mail (or a letter, this was a while ago) saying, "Look, Nicolae's speech doesn't work. I need a rewrite of pages this through that." Or, "Why did they go to Atlanta? Can you rewrite this scene for Chicago?" How, in short, did they get published without doing any rewriting whatsoever? Does the Christian publishing industry have editors? Inquiring minds want to know. -- Izunya

I think it's "Celebrity Effect"; LaHaye is a major-league *CELEBRITY* in Christian circles, and nobody second-guesses a *CELEBRITY*. This happens with a lot of charismatic pastors of independent/virtual congregations and/or televangelists; they can very easily end up surrounding themselves with yes-men and only with yes-men. (I believe one televangelist put it "TOUCH NOT MY ANOINTED! DO MY PROPHET NO HARM!")

It's one of the classic pointy-haired management styles, and has tripped up more autocratic bosses...

[Jeff]

why exactly do R&C fly to Atlanta through O'Hare for less than a day? Is there really anything that urgent for them to do?

They had to see a parking garage full of cars (pointed out by a black female cabbie). There are no parking garages in Chicago, and certainly no black female cabbies to point them out.

[Ken]

I agree with my learned friends' comments in re. Song of Ice and Fire and S.M. Stirling---while I loved Island in the Sea of Time, I thought the third book in the series felt like he'd gotten tired of the whole thing and wanted to wrap it up. -- Erick Oppeen

It still remains my type specimen of padding. He could have at least padded it out with the actual Battle of Roark's Drift instead of cribbing scene-by-scene from the movie...

I've seen a lot of the other side of this as well -- movies padded out so they fit the new standard of 2 hours (when 90 minutes used to be more than enough to tell a story). Almost every movie will have some scenes which add nothing to the story and leave me (at least) thinking "Come on... let's go back to the STORY.". -- Jeff

As a joke, the Wayne's World movie deliberately padded itself out with a (labeled as such in flashing subtitles) "GRATUITOUS SEX SCENE (TM)"...

most people in publishing, and definitely almost everyone in the genres, actually doesn't care whether the books are good or not. what they care about is the sales figures. if they can be certain that a title will sell based on something like name recognition, being a lot like a similar book that was a huge bestseller last year (see every Chick Lit book ever published since Bridget Jones), being part of a franchise, etc, that's enough for them. -- Opponax

This is called "Bandwagon Effect". I actually saw a Hollywood pitch sheet once; the pitch sessions you see on South Park are not exaggerated. A lot of it consisted of "Just Like (current hit) Except...".

I suspect a lot of Christian pitch sheets read "Just Like (current hit), Except CHRISTIAN!" (One of my informants claimed someone at a Christian bookstore plugged some fantasy trilogy to him as "Just like Tolkien, Except CHRISTIAN!" I think he had to go outside and beat his head against the nearest wall for half an hour after that one.)

Until recently. I suspect a lot of Christian pitch sheets nowadays read "Just Like Left Behind, Except..." Bandwagon effect.

[Steven]

An hour from O'Hare to the suburbs including a stop for groceries, like hell...

Well, if it was Rosemont, no problem. ;)

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

[cjmr]

Louise Erdrich's Tracks...it's one of the books you're inevitably assigned first semester of freshman year at any liberal arts college in the US.

In another fit of "boy do I feel old" Tracks appears to not have been published until one year after my first semester freshman literature course...

*goes off to add to Amazon wishlist*

[Izzy]

On S.M. Stirling: I also found Oceans of Eternity a little rushed and "...what just happened here?" as an experience. His Dies the Fire trilogy, on the other hand, is very well-done. I think he's figured out the pacing thing.

On splitting POV: What Jordan et al (and perhaps L&J, by extension) also miss about Tolkien is that he spent a whole two books--a thousand pages--with Frodo before he split the POV. He let us know what the story was about, who these people were, and why we should care about them; only then did he branch off.

Tolkien also only wrote six books. It's worth keeping in mind: I have yet to see a self-contained story over the seven-book mark that couldn't have benefitted by condensation.

[Cactus Wren]

regarding the lack of editing in L&J: it seems to be a recent phenomenon that pulp-ish writers who can be assured of selling zillions of books on name recognition alone (Chricton, Grisham, King, Rice, Patterson, Rowling, etc.) basically don't have editors nowadays, or at least not editors who aren't total sycophants. combining that with the need for the big fat books that adhere to that original 750 page agreement in the book deal, you get the excesses of L&J.
Oh, yeah. Hence much of Heinlein's late work. And a lot of Misty Lackey's recent material. And Piers Anthony's "Xanth" novels. "People will buy it because of the name. It's absolute shit, and the writer knows it's shit -- but people will buy it."

[Jake]

Tolkien also only wrote six books. It's worth keeping in mind: I have yet to see a self-contained story over the seven-book mark that couldn't have benefitted by condensation.

The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold, would be an example. Of course I don't know if it would fit your definition of self-contained story, since each book can stand alone, despite their all being part of one long storyline.

[PepperjackCandy]

IMNSHO, I think that Robert Jordan does a great job of splitting the POV. He spent close to the first half of the first doorstop on one POV. He generally doesn't switch POV mid-chapter. He introduces other characters, except when their identity and relationships are supposed to be mysterious, through at least one, and sometimes more than one, character.

[mcc]

I think that George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire does an excellent job of creating a "multi-threaded" narrative. In it, each chapter is told from a point of view of a different character. Occasionally, the same characters are observing the same events, and let me tell you -- a jousting match at a tourney as seen by a spoiled princess looks very, very different when seen by a seasoned politician. This technique really helps to flesh out the characters, and to make them feel human in a way that LH&J could never imagine (I bet they don't even see real humans as humans, huh). All the character threads in Song of Ice and Fire are woven into each other, and even when they don't meet, they contribute to a strong feeling of dramatic irony, as you keep thinking, "oh, if only they knew...".

This is a good comparison because one of the big reasons ASOIAF's character-bouncing works as well as it does is a good grasp of exactly what Fred is criticizing L&J for failing at here: Time. Martin can bounce around a bunch of different viewpoints with relatively little confusion, even with an unusually large cast, because he is very careful to give you subtle markers of more or less where and when each little chapter is occurring. He's even good enough about this that he can play little tricks with conveying perspective of time and space from the viewpoint of the characters-- major events will happen in one part of the continent, and news of what happens gradually spreads to the other characters over successive chapters, but no faster than the speed of horse and not always completely accurately...

The only time in the entire series that I remember him interleaving chapters in a way that jumps back and forth in time rather than progressing steadily is toward the end of one of the books, where the end of one of the books slightly overlaps the beginning of one of the others, and he marks this by actually including a little note explaining what happens when and kind of sheepishly apologizing.

[janet]

Izzy:
I have yet to see a self-contained story over the seven-book mark that couldn't have benefitted by condensation.

Jake:
The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold, would be an example.

Nope. The Vorkosigan books are a series, not a single work. This is completely different from what Tolkien did. Nearly all detective fiction is in series form -- standalone novels with continuing setting and characters; the best have an overarching story arc, e.g. the Wimsey/Vane novels.

A distinct but related form would be the serial, where multiple plot threads and characters advance simlutaneously, often very slowly, and where a lot of the pleasure is in the development of characters and relationships. A lot of 19th century fiction was serialzed in magazines; these days, most serial story-telling takes place on TV. Serials have an addictive quality: you just have to check in to find out what happened to Little Nell, or Willow, or Tony Soprano, but as long as you get to spend time with the characters you don't mind so much about the plot advancing.

[mcc]

I have yet to see a self-contained story over the seven-book mark that couldn't have benefitted by condensation.

Hmmm... Does Sandman count?

[the opoponax]

Sandman is a graphic novel first and foremost, no?

i think the conventions are probably different for illustrated narrative, as just as in film, they have a whole different set of constraints.

[mcc]

Yeah, you're surely right.

[Raka]

Cactus Wren: And a lot of Misty Lackey's recent material.

What the hell happened there, anyway? Heinlein descended slowly into curmudgeonly obstreperousness and eventually couldn't be bothered to come down off his hobby horses and tell a damn story. Anthony always sucked, but has consistently sucked in a sort of approachable lowest-common-denominator of speculative fiction sort of way. Lackey, on the other hand, started strong with Arrows*, got better with Vanyel, and then (as far as I can tell) farmed everything else out to progressively younger groups of fanfic authors. The drop in quality was abrupt and only got worse as time passed. Some of that perception might just be pleasant associations I formed with her early works when I was young and undiscriminating, but I think there's more to it than that.

*yes, I am forgetting the Kerowyn books and MZB's S&S collections.

"Sandman is a graphic novel first and foremost, no?"

Sandman is a comic book. COMIC BOOK. I realize it is neither comical, nor a book, but everybody knows a comic book is a magazine with sequential pictures, so why do we have to make up a new pretentious name for it because some people feel like they can't justify reading one? Graphic novel seems fine for a longer work, but an ongoing series of 22 page installments is a comic book, dammit. Read it with pride.

This nitpick brought to you by run-on sentences.

[NBarnes]

It also bears mentioning that Bujold is a ruthless editor in her own right and her Vorkosigan novels zip along at quite a pace, with relatively modest page and word counts. They're the better for it.

[Mugg]

3. Morning, Buck & Steve at JFK and Central Park (trip from airport to midtown takes about 10 minutes).

Well traffic is much shorter without all those school buses... maybe they did think of the ramifications of all the children in the world disappearing? [/sarcasm]

[Richard Hershberger]

Regarding Misty Lackey, my guess is that she suffered from early success. I thought the Arrow books showed promise: that Lackey had a gift for readable prose, but needed more experience and less "Pern, but with horses!" The problem was that she was immediately wildly successful. A moderately successful writer might have had a chance to learn from real editing. But with high sales numbers and fanboys and girls telling her how wonderousplendifitastic she was, the opportunity was lost.