"The Briar King" discussion -- Character Threads: do they work for you here? (spoilers)

[Peregrine]

How does it affect you as the reader that the author writes a story thread for each main character, switches about between threads, and leaves cliffhanger chapter endings? Praise? Criticism?

[Chris]

GRRM and Robert Jordan helped me to get used to the shifting POV character views. It's always a little frustrating to shift, right when a perspective is getting interesting. But this one is a little better in that the chapters are shorter, and it doesn't take as long to come back around. There also don't seem to be as many characters as GRRM or Jordan shift views from.

[LaTrica]

I agree that fewer characters makes this less frustrating. Length can play a part too. Too long and you've become invested in that one plot line and it feels like forever before you return. Too short and it reads like a constantly interrupted story. I think Keyes had a good length going.

[Peregrine]

This book has *fewer* characters? I see that I have taken an insufficient number of training laps in the Fantasy pool!

[Chris]

Peregrine wrote: "This book has *fewer* characters? I see that I have taken an insufficient number of training laps in the Fantasy pool!"

Compared to Martin and Jordan, I think the Bible has fewer characters...

[LaTrica]

Chris wrote: "Peregrine wrote: "This book has *fewer* characters? I see that I have taken an insufficient number of training laps in the Fantasy pool!"

Compared to Martin and Jordan, I think the Bible has few..."

I don't know if you were joking but I do believe that Jordan has more characters than I bible. It's one of the top reasons I stopped reading him. I was literally lost. I think Keyes kept it relatively simple in this book.

[Peregrine]

Chris wrote: Compared to Martin and Jordan, I think the Bible has fewer characters...

Hahahaha! Thanks for that.

[Peter]

IMO, JRR Tolkien did it more correctly. He'd start the book with a few of the characters together, pick up some more, lose some, and maybe split when the characters split and bring them back together when they came back together. But usually he kept it to 2 or maybe 3 groups. When an author runs 6 or 8 or 10 simultaneous storylines, it becomes a distraction for me.

The Dragonlance series also did it correctly in my mind. You had this core storyline, and the primary or other authors would pick up some of those branches and build their own stories filling in the backstory or gaps. An epic world is cool, but its hard to follow or really care about the simultaneous development of 30-40 "main" characters and an even larger host of supporters. I could develop feelings for the Fellowship characters in the LoTR, because there were only 7. It really actually mattered to me what happened to Sam and Frodo because I had invested so much time with them and their adventure.

[Lara Amber]

The chapters were the appropriate length for the constant switch back and forth between characters, and there weren't too many characters.

I'm split though, about continuing the series, since I agree the characters lack depth and he needed an editor to kill some of the more "colorful" descriptions.

Lara Amber

[Dawn]

I like the way GRRM is handling the number of characters with the first book introducing most of the main characters and then splitting the storylines, dedicating whole books to just two or three of the main 'trunk' stories. The one who frustrated me to no end was Melanie Rawn and and the Sunrunner books and Dragon Scrolls books. I don't normally have a problem with a lot of characters, but these books (to me) were a bit confusing and I had to read them all more than once in order to really keep things straight.