LogFAQs > #919551798

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TopicPotdMon: Nerd/Geek
Entity13
03/26/19 2:31:37 PM
#64:


ParanoidObsessive posted...
WhiskeyDisk posted...
Entity, just don't turn into one of those authors that has a penchant for naming characters unpronounceable things like Q'zrthkl'x because I rename characters like that "Bob" or "Jim" or "Susan" in my head so that dialog doesn't become a series of speed bumps.

I usually just cut out the middleman and refuse to read books like that at all.

It sort of goes hand in hand with what I tend to think of as the Blurb Test - when I read the back cover blurb of a book and they've thrown a half-dozen Proper Nouns at you before they even tell you the name of the main character, I put that book right back on the shelf and never look at it again. They're both generally good indicators that what you're looking at is hack genre trash written by an author who is just trying to mimic the style of other writers, and doesn't really have an interesting story of their own to tell.

Brandon Sanderson is particularly bad for that in my opinion. I actually liked his work finishing off the Wheel of Time books, so I thought I'd give him a chance to see what his own stuff was like, but every book just has so much jargon in the blurbs that my eyes just glaze over and my brain shuts off before I can even finish. In his case, at least, I think it's because he seems super-anal about coming up with the mechanical systems for magic in a setting and obsessing over the details before worrying about the actual story, and his pride in his work means he sort of wants to try and show it off as much as he can. But it makes the conceptualization way too dense for my taste.

The worst part is, books with way more complex metaphysics or mechanics or elaborate setting details have successfully managed to get by with far simpler blurbs. Roger Zelazny and Stephen Donaldson have written some of the more complex fantasy novels I've ever read in terms of narrative and setting detail, yet they almost always had cover blurbs that were incredibly inviting to casual readers and which made you want to read without drowning you in unnecessary surface details.



On the other hand I'd say that the blurbs are the fault of someone else working for the publisher. The author has only so much say in what goes into a book before the sales team tries to, you know, sell it with the cover. I like to think that better blurb writers for sales teams were easier to find in the 80s or 90s, whereas what we see now is a trend too many of them follow because they think it works.
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