LogFAQs > #963167236

Entity13 posted...

Well, no, his stories tend to be character heavy. The actual plots are often fine, but I love Mistborn, Warbreaker, and the first two Stormlight for the characters. Mind you, he still does go hard and heavy on the magic-as-science thing, which gets annoying in Stormlight or even the later Mistborn books when they bring up "Investiture." However, no, he does not just tack on the characters after the fact.

I was exaggerating for humorous effect. It is a thing I do.

But yes, he absolutely tends to focus on mechanics over plot. You can see it pretty clearly when you try to read a plot synopsis of a story (or the cover blurb on the back of the book), and about 70% of it is trying to explain Shardplate and Shardblades and Desolations and the Knights Radiant and Soulcasting and - at which point my eyes have completely glazed over and the book goes right back on the shelf forever.

It's one of the Three Cardinal Sins for fantasy/sci-fi writing for me. When I see it in cover blurbs on books I avoid them like the plague. The same goes for when like half the words in the blurb are Proper Nouns (which is the tell-tale sign of an insane obsessive worldbuilder), or when half the character names have pointless apostrophes and umlauts and the like (which suggests you're dealing with a hack writer who's aping Tolkien without understanding him - in which case you can probably also skim through the book and notice multiple examples of italicized songs/poetry, because Tolkien clones love that shit).

A good storyteller tells stories. Which tend to be fairly universal, and which can usually be explained or described without having to pull out 72 pages worth of jargon or complicated explanations. Ring bad, volcano, save the world. Got it.