net slum: re: Demi4

vael:

lamattgrind:

“I’m really bad at reading fantasy”, and we’re all bad at “reading” games

I don’t think that the mark of a good author is to mask their symbolism to the point where people like you and the author of that article cannot see the meaning. I definitely think it’s a common…

The only way to make it obvious would be to have a character come out and explain it - the point of symbolism is that you’re using a symbol to convey something other than its literal meaning. I think that, in writing at least, symbolism is easier to pick up on than in something visual like a graphic novel or a film - look at the people analyzing Watchmen for the tiny things hidden in the corner of some panel or whatever. Which, from my understanding, was intentional on the part of the creators, but even so. At least with a novel, stopping to think about whether it might be symbolic is usually all you need to do. Direwolf is the sigil of the Starks, stag is the sigil of the Baratheons, and they find a direwolf killed by a stag - all the pieces are there, you just need to think about it.

        It’s harder when you’re dealing with recurring themes or symbols that readers/academics notice, despite the author never intending them to mean anything. The accepted wisdom in critical analysis is that it’s perfectly valid to find meaning in something the author never intended, but that also means you have to do a lot of work to make sense out of it. Hence why they look for them to show how smart they are. In that case, the reason it’s so “well hidden” is that it wasn’t meant to be found.

        Getting back to your point about what makes an author good, I think there are a lot of different things they could be good at. Some authors are really great at writing (I hope the distinction makes sense, it’s the easiest way to say this), and they know just the right words to use and know when to follow the rules and when to break them. Others, like George R. R. Martin, are incredibly meticulous in their planning and know from the beginning how they’re going to set up everything that follows. Steven Erikson and Martin both do a fantastic job of playing with point of view, making good use of dramatic irony and… reverse dramatic irony? Leaving the reader guessing at what a character knows and their motivations, giving them bits and pieces of information as other characters discover the truth.

        In short, I’d say you could be a great author and a terrible writer, which makes me feel less guilty about some of the books I’ve read. Any story that takes several thousand pages to relate is bound to have issues, but they’ve got their strengths too. I realize this is completely tangential to what you posted, but I’d never thought of it this way until typing it just now - I felt like I shouldn’t defend an author because of their bad writing, despite enjoying their books overall. Well, good. Now we’ve all learned something!