There’s something that happens three times during that school year. If it’s not Quidditch, then I apologize for my bad memory. But yeah, when you make the entire game totally pointless because only catching the last ball means anything … How did Rowling manage to slip that her audience?
I totally disagree with this, because it seems to me that you’re confusing plot with a novel. Long, complex novels are obviously possible to write successfully and many are among the most celebrated novels of all time. Tolstoy, Thomas Wolfe, Mann, Proust, Anthony Powell, Joyce, Pynchon, Russell Banks.
Yes, it’s true that very long genre novels often fail to work. That’s normally because the writers can’t or have no need to handle the psychological complexities of a novel. I ranted about this above, so I won’t do it again. But nobody reads 900 page genre novels for the same reason they read Tolstoy. So there is no reason to write like Tolstoy. That has absolutely nothing to do with the form of the novel. It has to do with the form of the market.
Since you’re new, I should state that I happen to be a science fiction writer and critic. I honor the field, but I also see it pretty clearly for what it is. There are great sf books, and some long great sf books. Nobody confuses Dhalgren or Cryptonomicon or Little, Big with Rowling, though.
You’re thinking of the three tasks of the Triwizard tournament.
Not at all true. If your chasers are good enough, then the best seeker can’t win you the game.It happened at the Quidditch World Cup finals, and it happened in one of the Quidditch matches in book 5, when Harry was banned from Quidditch and Ginny was temporary seeker. Also, the Hogwarts Quidditch Cup (and presumably this is modeled on the professional Quidditch leagues) is awarded to the team with the most points at the end of the year. At the end of book 3, Harry had to make sure the Snitch was not captured until the Gryffindor chasers made up the overall season points difference, otherwise, they’d lose the cup despite winning the game. So the rest of the scoring is in fact of great significance.
Actually, I always interpreted it as the team with the best win/loss record, with the total number of points as a tiebreaker. So if you win all three of your matches, then you’ll win the cup, no matter how much the other house teams were running up the score in their games. The total score only mattered in book 3 because Gryfindor lost one of their matches (and everyone else lost at least one, too).
But yeah, quidditch only seems lopsided to us, because Harry was an extraordinarily good Seeker… for a schoolboy. If you had a Hogwarts team with a merely normal Seeker, or if Harry were trying to catch a professional-grade Snitch, then the quaffle scores would be much more significant.
IIRC (I don’t have book 3 on hand), prior to that last match, Harry or Oliver Wood or perhaps just the omniscient narrator ran down the list of possibilities of where Gryffindor would place in the Hogwarts Quidditch tournament, depending on how many points they scored in that last match. No mention was made of win/loss record.
Oh, I fully agree that it’s quite common for writers to get more longwinded later in their careers. In fact, I’m having a hard time thinking of an author whose later works are terser and more tightly written than their earlier ones. (Anyone?)
The part I was dubious about was the claim that this was because successful authors’ manuscripts aren’t subject to being edited the way new authors’ are. When a big name author sends in a manuscript, are they pretty certain to get it published as is?
The English translation of War and Peace weighs in at 560 thousand words. The Harry Potter series, taken as a whole, is roughly about a million words. That puts it on equal footing with things like Remembrance of Thing Past and Clarissa. The Wheel Of Time series, by contrast, clocks in at about 3.4 million words.
But SF books are, by tradition, tightly plotted. SF writers can’t get away with being as discursive as someone like Proust, or as long-winded as your average 17/18th century novelist. As you rightly point out, you don’t read Harry Potter the same way you read War and Peace.
I don’t believe I am. Not unless you’ve been reading too much of the wrong sort of EngLit criticism, and you think that “novel” means something else other than a long-form work of fiction.
My point is, an SF novelist who starts out with the intention of writing seven or twelve books with a common story arc, must by necessity develop a plot that’s complex enough to go the distance. As an SF writer, she doesn’t have the luxury of padding it out with essays on morality, like Henry Fielding did in Tom Jones, or turning it into a dynastic saga, or writing something essentially plotless. The story more or less has to be plotted, as per the expectation of an SF audience.
The trouble is, a massively extended plot becomes overly complicated, which as it grows, tends to require more and more explanation and supporting detail, and that’s the source of the bloat that turns what should be a 70 thousand word novel into 190 thousand words. That’s the limitation of the form I’m talking about. Extremely long works cannot be tightly plotted without becoming increasingly convoluted and bloated. The solution is to do pretty much what writers like Tolstoy do, which is, to mostly do away with plot – or perhaps, like Gulliver’s Travels, make it episodic.
Dude. Let’s not use “SF” to mean “speculative fiction” here, because it’s foolish in this case. Fantasy novels, specifically, have a long-deserved reputation for series bloat.
I can’t see any way of reading this that doesn’t make your argument circular. To paraphrase: SF must be tightly plotted because without a tight plot they aren’t SF books.
This is not inherent in SF books, though. It is inherent in books written for the market, of whatever type or genre. Even that goes too far, because there are many bestsellers that are not tightly plotted, although they do predominate today.
The bestseller is a genre unto itself today, one that crosses traditional genre boundaries. Books in the bestseller genre are different from more literary books and that is obvious to all readers. Critics don’t need to say a word.
I’m still unsure why episodic plots or quest books (Tolkien and all his imitators) don’t qualify for tightly plotted, though. They can be tight on many other levels. Of course, the more I think about it, the less I understand what your definition of a tightly plotted book is in the first place, since you give no examples. I also am not clear how you define plot in a single long novel as opposed to over a series of books. I need clarity.
When Gryffindor lose the first game, Fred and George go on about how “it will all come down to the points”. That suggests that it doesn’t always come down to points.
Well, in a round-robin style tournament (which is what is described), point differential can indeed be a factor. Now, if your team wins all three games straight up, then obviously point differential shouldn’t be a factor, assuming win/loss record controls first.
That’s what I was getting at. One of Fred and George was worrying about Hufflepuff beating Ravenclaw, which is another indicate that wins trump points.
You interpret my argument to be more extreme than I ever meant it. Of course there are SF books that do away with the plotting conventions of the market-driven genres. That’s what the whole New Wave was about. Michael Moorcock’s Cornelius Chronicles is an example (and it’s also one of the most widely reviled series in SF). We’re talking about trends, after all, not absolutes.
The Harry Potter series is definitely not like the Cornelius Chronicles. Rowling (and other writers like her) attempts to apply conventional plotting to a seven book series weighing in at a million words. All I’m suggesting is that the conventional methods might not be up to the task. It’s around about book four or five where you see the series story arc start to spiral out of control and overwhelm the episodic formulas she established in the first three books of the series. That’s also the point where the books start to get fatter. There’s too many unresolved plot points flying around that she’s trying to juggle, hence the bloat.
I’m not saying that episodic books don’t qualify as tightly plotted. I’m saying they approach the task differently. They don’t have so many unresolved plot points carrying on through the whole work. Instead, they maintain only the very most rudimentary overall story arc, and each episode is a story in its own right that is fully resolved before we move on to the next episode. Quest plots lend themselves to this kind of treatment, and The Hobbit is a fairly good example of that.
Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, I would argue suffers from the same kind of problem as the Harry Potter series (just not so obviously, because it’s a much shorter work). It’s pretty clear that Tolkien meant to tell the story through the viewpoints of his hobbit characters (as he did in The Hobbit). He didn’t really bother fleshing out his non-hobbit characters because they would only be viewed at a distance, more or less as heroic archetypes.
Of course, that goes wrong pretty quickly. While the hobbits are trudging uselessly around the Midgewater all the real story is happening off-stage, which then has to be told as back-story in all those tedious council of Elrond chapters. From there on the hobbits become little more than baggage as Tolkien tries to introduce other viewpoint characters – i.e. the humans and elves he didn’t bother fleshing out from the start. We forgive Tolkien for some of this awkwardness, because LOTR in other ways is an extraordinary accomplishment. Nonetheless, most Tolkien fans first read LOTR as young teenagers. When you’re fourteen and somewhat lacking in life experience, you don’t notice how remarkably flat Aragorn is as a character. People who first read LOTR as adults tend to wonder what all the fuss is about.
But I’ll stop now, because I’m starting to wander away from the topic.
That’s a good point that I hadn’t considered before. It probably applies to a lot of really successful authors.
It’s not just the length of the books that shows lack of editing, it’s the length of the paragraphs, the terrible punctuation, repetition, inconsistencies and a dozen other things which a good editor should be able to pick up on. They don’t necessarily mean that the author is a bad writer, either - they’re also things which are difficult to spot in your own work when you’ve already redrafted it half a dozen times.
Holy Frito and Dildo, are you me? I read LotR as an adult and I’ve never understood the love for it. Almost nobody else gets that. Believe me, I know, because I said that when the movies came out.
