| Re: Is worldbuilding pointless?
John Harrison is a poet and a master of the Anglish language.
He is not after logic. But I perfectly understand that a logical mind can be thrown off by the author's disinterest for the internal consistency of a setting.
I always go for consistency because my beta-readers pester me too much about that. And they scare me, and follow me on my cell phone, and inside my head, asking questions about this and that. Most of my worldbuilding comes from their bullying of me. I am a coward.
Now I've been bitten, though. I find worldbuilding exhilarating, as a writer.
If I put myself in the shoes of a reader… I hate info-dump, and I dislike too many descriptions. I mean, a novel that is mostly based on the setting? This led me to read the first 200 pages of Perdido Street Station in two months! The novel is a beautiful tour de force, although the story could have worked as well if the author had cut a lot of digressions.
I think that this was Miéville’s outrageous way of being “different”. And it worked.
As for Tolkien, the first time I read the LotR, I skipped most of the descriptions, as I did with Zelazny’s transformation of the Shadows in the Amber cycle. These two are my favourite authors ever, but I hate to stumble on digressions when I am walking down a story.
Of course, I go back and re-read. Once, twice, ten times.
Digressions are good for the re-readers.
EDIT: sorry, the last sentence in Miéville’s interview is not his. It was an editing gone awry:
'And, of course, the Big Question: “would Tolkien’s books have been nearly as enjoyable if he hadn’t described his world at length?”' |