A Game of Thrones Was Not Written For Me

It is, once again, the middle of my lunch break at work. As usual, I was reading A Game of Thrones while eating my lunch.

Right before my coworkers came in and distracted me, I read a passage that made it abundantly clear that George R.R. Martin is a horrible writer.

The mark of a good writer is that he (or she -- I'm just gonna use 'he' for brevity) can write clean prose that is still descriptive, while giving each character depth, feeling, and a voice. A character's thoughts, words, and actions need to ring true. They can't just be what the author thinks the character would do, think, or say based on how the author wants the story to unfold. Characters also should not act as mirrors for main characters by saying, thinking, and doing things that only reflect their opinion of the main character rather than something about themselves.

Good writers observe people and read a variety of books. They then sublimate this information into characters who don't act the way the author desires them to act, but in a way that a real person with the characteristics of the character, at the time the character was living would act.

This is why Pride&Prejudice rocks as a piece of literature. All the characters in the book act like real people. They're just as dumb, impetuous, narcissistic, selfish, and stubborn as real people. And while the mores of time during which P&P is set are alien to us now, the way the characters behave is not.

Now back to A Game of Thrones.

George R.R. Martin (GRRM) has written a character with no flaws in Eddard Stark. The man's fucking perfect. He takes care of his bastard son. He takes care of his kids. He is just. He is compassionate. He is fair. He is everything you want in a hero and so much fucking more. He is so fucking fantastic that all his wife wants to do is let him impregnate her.

To wit:

[Eddard Stark] looked somehow smaller and more vulnerable, like the youth she had wed in the sept at Riverrun, fifteen long years gone. Her loins still ached from the urgency of his lovemaking. It was a good ache. She could fill his seed within her. She preyaed it would quicken there. [...] She was not too old. She could give him another son.

 I'll give you a moment to finish your "Ewwwwww!"

All good? Great. Moving on.

Stark's wife is sitting in bed after he's apparently pounded her like nobody's business and what is she thinking? "My husband still looks hot. I'm not old yet. I hope I get preggers again. That way I'll prove to him that I'm worthy. Plus he's so awesome that I just totes want to be preggers by him!"

What does that tell us about these two people? It tells us that Stark is FUCKING ACES! YEAH!

Ahem.

We learn that Stark still looks young, even though he's old. We learn that he can still bring his wife...wait...I was going to say "bring his wife to orgasm", but that's not clear. All we know is that his wife has genital bruising. Let's be generous and say that he can still satisfy his wife (who may have never actually had a good lover, for all we know). Finally, we know that he's such a great guy that his wife hopes that she's not too old for him and can still carry another kid -- a son, specifically.

What do we learn about Stark's wife? We learn that she is a figment of someone's imagination because no woman in the history of humanity has ever thunk these things after sex. Ever.

I could believe that she thought her husband was pretty hot. I could believe that she thought that her 'nads were achy. But that's where it ends. I doubt she'd be thinking, "I hope I'm not too old" or "I hope I get preggers". I'd be more inclined to think that she'd be thinking that that was a pretty good romp, and that she would really like a nice bath and maybe a nap. And why the fuck isn't her husband coming to bed to cuddle?

*sigh*

I'm not renewing the loan on this book. I'm done.

 

Foundation's Edzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

In 1986 my homeroom teacher was Ms Michaelson. She was a severe, skinny woman who thought that being entirely unreasonable instilled discipline.

The class was English and Ms Michaelson insisted that we arrive 10 minutes early for class. For the first five pre-class minutes, we wrote in our journals; the next five minutes were spent reading a book of our choice.

A reasonable alternative to NyQuil

I really disliked Ms Michaelson. For one thing, if you were late for the pre-class, she'd send you for a late slip. This was insane. You'd end up arguing with some minor administrator -- or worse yet, secretary -- who would send you back without a late slip (because you weren't late). But by the time you'd get back to class, you would be late, and so you'd be sent down for a late slip again. For another, she was one of those people who told you that only boring people get bored. That is so not true. You know who gets bored? Smart people who are trapped listening to idiots all day and don't have a decent book with them, that's who!

I have no idea why I decided to bring Foundation's Edge as my book of choice. My parents' house is lousy with books. Books literally fall on your head when you open closets. I think I had originally brought Agatha Christie's A Cat Among The Pigeons, but that took me about a week to read. My guess is that I wanted something more challenging and that's why I picked up Foundation's Edge. But I was a teenager, so who the fuck knows what I was thinking.

Anyways, I did not like the book. I thought it was dull as all get-out until the last few chapters when something actually happened. 

And so the book remained at my parents' house, in the basement.

Until this past Christmas.

You know what happens when it's Christmas, you have nothing to do, you're sick, and you're at your parents' house? You make bad decisions. Decisions like reading Foundation's Edge again to see if it's as dull as you remember it.

Spoiler: it is.

A good 90% of the book is blahblahblah. And by this I mean that 90% of the book is taken up by exposition fairies. Exposition fairies take over every single character for most of the book. And they go on and on and on. Paragraphs of dialogue take up entire half pages! Who the fuck cares how the fucking spaceship works? I don't. I care about where you're going and why. Who the fuck cares about how you calculated the fucking coordinates of the dumbass planet? I don't. Maybe someone does. Maybe some überfanboy somewhere is keeping track of all the tech and making sure it makes sense. But that fanboy is not me.

I was too busy skipping over pages and pages of this blahblahblah to get to some part -- any part -- where someone talked to someone about something not tech. I swear there should be a Bechdel Test for science fiction. I'm calling it the Snad Test:

1. There must be at least two "regular" characters
2. Who have a conversation
3. That is not about tech

Sweet Cheesus on a Cheesestick! I think I had to wait til the before last chapter or something for a climax and dénouement to happen. And when it did, it was totally antclimactic. 

Do you want a synopsis? Here's a synopsis:

Eons (millennia?) after the Seldon Plan, some guy named Golan Trevize decides that the Seldon Plan is going too well and that obviously the Second Foundation -- which was full of "scholars" with mind control abilities yaddayaddayadda -- had not been destroyed back in that other book (Second Foundation? Foundation and Empire? I don't know; I didn't read it.) and was still controlling their minds. So he gets booted off his planet and sent off to find these Second Foundation guys for reasons that are totally bizarre. Meanwhile, back on the farm, some guy from the Second Foundation gets attacked by a bunch of ruffians, and his Second Foundation buddies also send him off to do something because of Extra Tasty Contrivance. Oh, and Golan's bestie, whose name escapes me, is sent off to follow Golan because of Super Chocolatey Contrivance. Golan correctly guesses that his bestie is a Second Foundation operative, but that really doesn't matter. In the end, they all end up in the same place -- a planet called Gaia -- that is sentient or something. A whole lot of deus ex machina dust is sprinkled by the mind-control entity that is Gaia so that the entire implausible storyline makes sense. 

There ya go. 

Only read this book if you're suffering from insomnia and you find NyQuil distasteful.

Dear Friend, I Just Read The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Dear Friend,

I just finished reading a book called "The Perks of Being aWallflower". It is about a boy who is 15 in 1992, but it was written by an adult man in 1999. The book is written in the form of letters from the boy to a friend. The boy's name is Charlie. I don't know what his friend's name is. I don't even know if the friend really exists because we never see any replies to Charlie's letters. I think the letters may be a writing exercise, but I'm not sure.

The boy is very sad. He tells you he's sad a lot, and it seems like everything that happens makes him sad. The boy doesn't have many emotions, come to think of it. He only tells you when he's sad. He never uses other words to describe how he feels, like "distraught" or "devastated". When he does use fancy words, he puts them in quotation marks. I guess he wants to show that he doesn't really know what those words mean because he only read them in a book or heard them in English class. There was no internet in 1992 where he could have looked them up. Dictionaries also were not invented yet.

Beside being sad, Charlie has a very exciting life and has some very good friends. His friends are Patrick, Sam, who is a girl, and Mary Elizabeth. Patrick is gay and he is dating the quarterback of the football team. They have had sex. Charlie is in love with Sam, but she is dating Craig. Mary Elizabeth really likes Charlie, but Charlie doesn't like Mary Elizabeth as much. They all participate in the Rocky Horror Picture Show floor show, which is unusual for teenagers in 1992.

Charlie has listened to Nirvana's new album and he even put a song from it on a mix tape that he gives Patrick. Patrick tells him that the mix tape is very sad. That's how you know that there is something wrong with Charlie. Charlie also tells you that there's something wrong with him because he is not "normal". Charlie writes everything in a very "monotonic" voice. This may be because the grownup who wrote the book thinks that this is the way teenage boys write.

This book reminded me a lot of Go Ask Alice, which was also written by a grownup pretending to be a teenager. In Go Ask Alice, the author pretends that the teenager is writing in a diary. The author does not do a good job, though, and you can tell that the teenager isn't a real teenager. The author who wrote The Perks of Being a Wallflower (his name is Stephen Chbosky) also does not do a very good job at writing like a teenager. The author puts in too many details in some cases, and not enough in others. Sometimes it sounds like you are reading a regular book and not letters. This would have been OK if the book did not feel "like an afterschool special". Too many bad things happen to Charlie for it to be believable, I think.

I am also not sure if Charlie is autistic. Charlie has very deep insight into many things, but can't figure out the people around him. Charlie does not get excited about anything, not even sex!

Charlie has an aunt that died. She was very nice to him. Charlie feels guilty about her death because she died in a car crash getting his Christmas present. Then Charlie finds out something very sad about his aunt. This is very important.  I can't tell you more about this because that would ruin the ending.

I do not think I really liked this book. I think The Catcher in the Rye was better. The Catcher in the Rye was also written by an adult about a teenager who is not normal. That teenager, Holden Caulfield, is telling his story. It is a good book and Holden Caulfield seems like more of a real teenager, even though he lived a long time ago when there wasn't even any TV.

That is all for now. I think Stephen Chbosky thought he was very clever.

Bye for now
Snad

Rewriting A Game of Thrones

In music and painting, it's typical to reproduce existing works. Sometimes musicians and artists just reproduce the work to gain skills ("I can finally play Stairway!"), and sometimes they don't reproduce the work so much as they reinterpret it ("I'm re-doing Stairway as a Gregorian Chant. It isn't really much of a stretch.").

But there's no such tradition in writing. In writing, if you try to rewrite anything, it's considered plagiarism.  (Though I do know of one guy, Chris Eaton, who did a remake -- a cover, if you will -- of Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes. The book's called The Grammar Architect and it's not bad.)

I don't like that. I think that a good way to practice writing is to take something miserably bad -- something like, say, A Game of Thrones -- and rewrite it so that it's almost palatable.

I'm not an awesome writer, but I think that I can make at least one passage from that first Game of Thrones book less awful. I mean, seriously, this book reeks. The author, George R.R. Martin (you need those initials if you want to be a fantasy writer, right J.R.R. Tolkien?), shoves so many unneeded words, including superfluous adverbs and obnoxious turns of phrases, into his writing that I have to assume that the book is a big giant fuck you to Strunk&White, Anne Lamott, and Stephen King.

That is if George R.R, Martin's heard of them.

You may be wondering (if you exist) why the hell I'm reading A Game of Thrones to begin with. Well, as you may or may not know, I work at a technology company. All my coworkers have read A Game of Thrones and they're all big fans of the show. I just started watching the show and I am not a big fan. I decided that maybe -- just maybe -- the books would be better. So I checked the first book in the series out of the library (I'm not making the mistake I made with The Help and Peyton Place ever again). 

Within the first few pages I realized that this was not going to go well. When you roll your eyes five times within the first ePage of your eBook, you know that this is not going to go well. When you spot the second mention that the blood was "like summer wine" on the snow, you know you're deep into 50 Shades of Shit territory.

I read a passage to one of my fanboy coworkers and asked him, very seriously, if he thought George R.R. Martin could shove any extra words into the sentence, and my coworker answered, "Obviously it's bad if you insist on reading the words!"

*sigh*

This brings me to right now. I was reading the book over lunch and thought, "I could rewrite this. I could rewrite this with fewer stupid words and keep the intent. I'm sure I could."

So for your reading pleasure -- or not, I'm doing this cold in the few remaining minutes of my lunch hour -- is a rewrite of a passage from Book 1 of A Game of Thrones.

The passage:

Viserys had been a boy of eight when they fled King's Landing to escape the advancing armies of the Usurper, but Daenerys had been only a quickening in their mother's womb.

Yet sometimes Dany would picture the way it had been, so often had her brother told her the stories. The midnight flight to Drangonstone, moonlight shimmering on the ship's black sails.  Her brother Rhaegar battling the Usurper in the bloody waters of the Trident and dying for the woman he loved. The sack of King's Landing by the ones Viserys called the Usurper's dogs, the lords Lannister and Stark. Princess Elia of Dorne pleading for mercy as Rhaegar's heir was ripped from her breast and murdered before her eyes. The polished skulls of the last dragons staring down sightlessly from the walls of the throne room while the Kingslayer opened Father's throat with a golden sword.

She had been born on Dragonstone nine months after their flight, while a raging summer storm threatened to rip the island fastness apart.

The rewrite:

Viserys was eight when he and his pregnant mother had fled King's Landing to escape the advancing armies. Viserys had told Dany the story of the battle so often that she almost felt that she had been there herself. She saw the sack of King's Lading by the invading armies of the Usurper, led by Lord Lannister and Lord Stark -- the men her brother called "the Usurper's dogs". She saw Princess Elia of Dorne plead for her child's life after he was taken from her. She saw the blood filled waters of the Trident, and her brother Rhaegar battling the Usurper there. He would die in vain trying to protect Princess Elia. She saw the Kingslayer slash her father's throat with his gold sword as the dragon head trophies watched from the walls.

Finally, Dany saw their departure in the dead of night. She saw the moonlight shimmer on the ship's sails, and she saw Dragonstone in the distance. It was on Dragonstone that she was born nine months later.

There ya go. That took me 10 minutes and I haven't made any revisions to it (I haven't even given it a once over). I have no idea how good or bad that is, but it can't be that much fucking worse than the original.

Feel free to comment on how I missed the point of A Game of Thrones and how the fake medieval language is part of the book. (Just like how Gwyneth Paltrow's fake Brit accent is part of Shakespeare in Love?)