A Dance with Dragons question

I finished this book but did not think it was as good as the first 4 books. To me it was a digression from the main story. I felt that the author wrote it because he felt he had to and did not have any idea of how to move the epic forward or he needed the money or his publisher told him to write another book for the series.

I love a good epic fantasy, but I wish editors would be a little more liberal about saying "cut out some of the many banal descriptions" or "move things along, so and so."

not that i feel their writing is very good, but i prefer the storytelling strategy of authors like terry brooks or raymond e. feist: trilogies. fairly concentrated stories, plenty of tantalizing roads to sneak a peek down but rarely follow, then done. when they and the fans inevitably want some more of the fantasy world, they revisit it in a new adventure.

jordan and martin don't feel so much like epic storytellers as epic AAA tour guides. martin does this far less than jordan did, and in a different way, but both of them get carried away taking you to every last place of note in the land. jordan wanted to drag us on a walking tour of every geographic and cultural highlight he came across, martin wants to stay up all night on a pub crawl through every locale of human depravity or tragic incompetency.

don't get me wrong, the epic tourism really appeals to me at times. i like to revel in the land of make-believe too, which is how i mustered the will to chew through a three-hundred page circus digression, the crossroads of naptime, and stumble through a feast for crows.

but even the best road trip has a trajectory and terminus. drag things on too long, and the adventure becomes a drag. i realize i've been wearing the same jerkin for weeks. i obsess about how crowded the horse cart is, how greasy my noble companions have become. finally it dawns on me that there are 250 exploits in local color to go before we reach the castle.

to paraphrase rodney dangerfield, today's epic fantasy looks at a road map and says, 'ok,' when a trip from the shire to mount doom and back (with a few judicious digressions) might have been quite adequate.

I'm with you 100%. I feel like I might enjoy the Wheel of Time, as one of my close friends is a big fan, but I'm never going to start it because it is huge. Although I've really enjoyed A Song of Ice and Fire, its length initially made me wary of beginning it and did delay my reading it for at least 6 months. Lord of the Rings is the gold standard everything is compared to, but at less than 1500 pages (including The Hobbit), it's shorter than 1.5 ASOIAF books. It's all just too much.

I am not against a big book..

I am against authors that drag it out... even more so when they capitalize off it with side projects before they finish their series -- especially when side projects delay the series. GRRM is one of the more frustrating writers. His books are decent.. but they aren't the best(I will take anything written by Sanderson -- among many others -- any day over GRRM).. and for everyone that bitches about Jordan and his outfits (which did get old) GRRM is worse with the food and the plodding through snow and the You know nothing Jon Snow garbage.

The biggest problem with big books is when they prevent the books from getting to the readers..

At least Jordan managed to keep books coming.. regardless if some of it was fluff. Before he got really sick.. the books came on average about every 2 years. I say on average because the first few he released within a year of the previous one... and it slowly increased.. but the longest between a book before he was dying was just over 2 years.. and the gap between the last book he wrote and the first Sanderson wrote was only 4 years. Think about that for a moment. 12 books from 1990 to 2005... and in the last few years of his life he organized and managed the remaining 3 books so that Sanderson could take over and finish. That entire 14 book series was finished in 23 years.. and that includes the author dying, and another author picking it up and finishing it -- and doing great justice to the series in the process.

I am not trying to harp on about how Jordan is better or whatever. But use that as comparison.. (especially since people earlier in the conversation were playing down Jordan) What is GRRM's record?

He took 2 and a half years between the first and second book.. another year for the third... and then everything screeches to a stop as he realizes he has no clue what to do next (and he let himself get busy with side projects)... 5 years for the 4th book, and then 6 years for the 5th.. as of right now we are 3 years towards the 6th.. and the story is no where near being done. (after 18 years) Oh.. and we will now most likely find out about the ending via the shitty tv show instead of getting to read about it. Awesome!

TLDR: I don't mind big books if they aren't taking forever to come out. And by forever.. I mean 3+ years (assuming the author is healthy).

My biggest problem is the wait, 5 years between books is just too much,.
And as pointed out by Sheena, book 4 introduced too many new characters, very late in the "game" so to speak, so it's starting to feel like he's just trying to stretch it out, for no other reason than to stretch it out.

I say the bigger the better as long as the story keeps moving along.

With this GoT series, I enjoyed it tremendously and tore right through each book, but I am daunted by the fact that I would want to re-read each of them when the latest installment comes out (to refresh my memory). As to The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, I had read 4-5 books then got very angry when I realized there were a unlimited number of books and I felt they were incredibly repetitive. So, to answer your question, yes, I feel that the length/depth/breadth of certain fantasy series IS off-putting.

I really love this series but what you mention, is really my only complaint. As result, some readers I know are having difficulty following the story and gave up on it. As for me, I found it disappointing to; late in the series have new characters introduced/focused on, taking away from "screen time" of stories that I do care about. Book 4 was the worst for that...

I am a sucker for long books. I always have been, but I think Martin may be taking it too far. I love the series, don't get me wrong, but there are some times where I just want to smack the man for making the books so long. I mean, I will get to what might be a good stopping point and then he skitters off somewhere else. And I also have to agree that the psychological depth of the characters is fading. That annoys me to no end. I love exploring the psychology of characters. To me, that is probably the greatest travesty of the whole thing. If you can write an extremely long book, but you leave out character development, it is like just reading some kind of soap opera. And I most certainly annoyed by the wait time. But then I heard Marin's health had been really, really bad lately and that even he is worried about finishing his books. I heard he gave HBO all the material he has on the series, even the unfinished drafts for them to peruse, so that if I can't get the books out at least they can finnish the TV series. I am not sure that is necessarily a good thing though...

No, the bigger the better - more of a good thing is better, plus a larger canvas allows entirely different sorts of story than you can fit into a little standalone.

However, that doesn't mean that all long series are good. Writing a very long series has its own difficulties - your foibles and repetitions are exaggerated, any weakness in controlling plot and pace can become fatal, the potential for inconsistency becomes greater, and so on.

The Wheel of Time isn't flawed because Jordan decided to write a 12-book epic - it's flawed because he tried to do that but wasn't able to do it well. There's nothing in the epic format that meant he had to slow down individual plots until they covered five novels in a row with absolutely zero progression in any of them; there's nothing in the length per se that forced him to talk endlessly about people's clothing, or spanking, or to keep repeating the same one-line tag-motifs for each character, or to make all his women fundamentally the same, or any of the other things that went wrong. It's true that his flaws as a writer were made more obvious by the extreme length of his books - but then, who's to say that a standalone novel wouldn't have exposed OTHER flaws? Most of what IS great about WOT wouldn't have been possible without the immense canvas to work on. So the length enables some virtues and hides some vices - and enables some vices and hides some virtues.

If it is a good series, then I don't mind it being long. But I also make sure that I don't read them all in one go, and I intersperse the books from the series with other, completely different, stand alone books so I don't get burnt out by the one story. Seems to work for me.

For me book 5 reads either like a series of short stories, just within the same world, or tv actions scenes.
It's my least favourite one, and I think GRRM is far more worried about the tv series than the books now. Gone are the wonderful psychological meanders that each character had, reasoning, development, etc, and now it's just "this happens here" and "this happens there" and "they move from here to there" and...

I've just finished watching season 2, after waiting a while because I wasn't sure I really wanted to, and I was appalled that such a rich book got condensed in 10 episodes, which even included scenes not in the book, and others from volume 3 already...

I know that I will never like a film or tv program as much as I like the books, but I get really mad when that gets in the way of a good book, which is what's clearly doing to GRRM.
I love big books, but I agree that there needs to be some respect by the author towards their readers, which means reasonable time between books and a timely and known number of books in the series.

I agree that GRRM is taking way too long between books. Had I known beforehand that there were 7 books in the series and that he takes forever to finish and release a book , I would have NEVER started it. I started the series when the 4th book was in paperback and was told 1 more book would to complete the series. I am curious how the television series will continue considering the book series isn't finished.

Deborah, I couldn't agree more. If you read Mr. Martin's blog you can clearly tell he is raking in the dough off of this book series and thinks he is now the cat's meow of Hollywood.
Each time I hear or read America's Tolkien I get angrier than the time before. Mr. Martin is a good storyteller and his books and movie are entertaining but he isn't even in the top 10 authors to be compared to Tolkien. Like you say he strings along the story unnessarily. What about Jamie Lannister, Robb and Catelyn? I thought he just couldn't let go and dragged it on and on.

Personally i have enjoyed many epic fantasy series. My issues with GRRM is the gradual increasein time it has taken in between novels for the next to be released. One or two years, sure, but five years plus is pushing it in my opinion. What can you do though. Everyone has their processes I guess?

I have to say I love how long the series is, because I don't want it to end. What can I say I'm a fan.

The Wheel of Time is the only one of these I've really had a problem with. If I read she "crossed her arms under her breasts" or "smoothed her dress" one more time I may puke. But Brandon eliminated quite a bit of that tedium when he took over in the last couple of books. Other than that I guess I've enjoyed the epic length epics.

I keep reading this series, and I keep enjoying it. But I have to say I feel a growing resentment toward the series and the author. I feel duped. Really, if you can't tell a complete series in 5000 pages it may not be because the story is too big, but rather because you don't really want to.

There are things about Martin that I love. He's willing to be really hard on his characters. I love that he will sacrifice them to the story.

But I believe he's just stringing us along as he watches the royalties roll in.