Paolini Guest Podcast: Styling Up Your World, Part 3

[torylltales]

 

E: Well, here we go again. 
TT: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more...

M: Going on… what was your writing kryptonite?

C: [laughter] My writing kryptonite-

E: -is your inability to keep your goddamn plot straight? Your incapacity for creating sympathetic protagonists? Your apparent allergy to proper character development?

TT: Lack of writing ability, imagination, or empathy?

C: Ooh, um, well with the Inheritance Cycle it was-

E: -the fact that you clearly lost interest in the whole thing about halfway through?

C: -it was writing this character called Arya, who was this elven woman who’s about a hundred and twenty years old, and I am a lot of things but I am not a hundred and twenty year old elven woman.

E: Which is an extra big problem because you suck so very much at putting yourself in another person’s shoes. 

TT: Tolkien wasn’t a hobbit, but he managed. Steven King isn’t an evil possessed car. Lin Manuel Miranda isn’t a bastard, orphan son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor--

Sorry, I got a bit carried away.

C: So she was really difficult to write, and I was fortunate enough to have some really good feedback from my family and from my editor, all of whom helped me, uh, do justice to Arya’s character and present a better version of her than it would have been if it had just been me writing all on my own. So she was difficult. 

E: Maybe that’s why he finally came to his senses and realised it would be a horrible idea to have her shack up with a sixteen year old creep. I’ve recently been talking to a friend who’s been having trouble with a twelve year old student of his who has developed a pubescent crush on him - a guy in his thirties - and won’t stop pestering him even after being repeatedly told it’s inappropriate and please knock if off. That’s pretty much Eragon/Arya in a nutshell. 

TT: I shudder to think how much shallower her character could have been if he hadn’t listened to that advice. 

C: But with writing in general, uh, I think it’s finding the motivation to work on the same projects day in and day out. 

E: Diddums. 

TT: same way most people find the motivation to get up every morning and go to their job: because they need to do it or not get paid.

C: And I think that’s something that every writer deals with on occasion. 

M: Yeah. I totally agree and I think all us teen writers can relate. 

C: [laughter]

E: Now you’re just being rude.

TT: I’ve been part of teen writing groups, I’ve been a teen writer, I’ve known and been friends with teen writers. None of the people I talked to ever had a problem with motivation.

M: ...getting yourself to actually write. 

C: Yeah, and what helps is remembering why you fell in love with the story in the first place and then also your larger motivations for writing.

E: The fame and the money and people telling you you’re a genius?

TT: the Inheritance Cycle is so devoid of meaning and thematic focus, I really could not even begin to guess what Paolini loved about writing it. Aside from the fame and money.

C: ...and keeping those firmly in your mind, so you’re not wasting time that you’ll regret later on.

E: Well ya sure as hell wasted plenty of other peoples’ time. Mine included. I could be playing Psychonauts 2 right now, ya know. But nooo, I promised toryll. 

TT: Thank you for your sacrifice. I was physically unable to do anything involving listening and understanding, due to being one hearing aid down for a week.

As for keeping your goals and “larger motivations for writing” firmly in mind… he sure seemed to lose sign of them about halfway through Brisingr. And a third of the way into To Sleep.

E: Ah, you’re welcome. It was good to have something to do while I’m stuck at home.

M: So what is one writing rule or kinda piece of advice that you have ignored?

E: Miss, the list of writing rules and advice he has ignored could fill several books. 

TT: It would be far easier to list the writing rules he didn’t ignore.

C: Mmm. Mmmm! [long pause] No-one’s asked me that before!

E: Oh shit I don’t have a pre-prepared canned response! Uh, no comment! I mean, uh, evil grin wait for book five! ...Aw hell. 

TT: error… error… response not found... 

C: I think… [speaking very slowly] ...the advice to avoid the use of passive voice at all times. There are lots of pieces of writing advice out there which are delivered with iron clad certainty, as if you must adhere to these rules 100% of the time. And that’s not actually true, that’s actually one of my issues with Strunk and White-

E: ...oh he did NOT just go there.

TT: Yes, he did.

C: Which is a famous style guide, of course. They issue lots of proclamations - “You MUST do it this way! You MUST do it that way!” And sometimes they even break their own rules in explaining those rules! Without commenting or necessarily realising it. So passive voice is one of those things where it is good to avoid it most of the time. But it is still a useful tool. 

E: You’re a tool. 

TT: Strunk & White is an obsolete style guide from the 1920s that was mainly aimed toward academic writing and journalism, NOT creative writing. Furthermore, it is a GUIDE, not a rulebook.

C: Ahem. As an example, if you say “I was born on the 4th of July”, that’s passive! The active form of that would be “my mother gave birth to me on the 4th of July”. But you wouldn’t put it that way unless you wanted the focus to be on the person who performed the action - your mother. Saying “I was born” - the focus is on you. Or “he was born”, “she was born”, the focus is on the person who was born.

E: Wow really, no kidding? You wanna belabour the point a little more there, broski? 

TT: He’s so close to getting the point, but still so far away. The problem Strunk had with the passive voice is when it is used to obscure the topic (what a sentence is about) of a sentence in favour of the comment (what is being said about the topic). “I was born” is passive in syntax, but the topic is “I”, and that’s what the sentence is focused on. Strunk was complaining about usage of the passive voice where the topic is obscured, as in “the bill was passed (by the politicians)”.  Third point, “I was born” is a terrible example because there exists no alternative to the passive voice. There is no active construction in English of the verb “to be born”. I birthed? I borned? It is not possible for that particular phrase to be reworded in an active way (which neatly reflects the practical impossibility of a baby taking an active role in the act of their birth). So that’s just a terrible example that fails to make the point he wants to make. Oh, sorry - the point was failed to be made by the example.

C: So… in general, keeping in mind those sorts of exceptions, and that the rules themselves are guidelines, not iron-clad laws.

E: You would not believe how utterly smug and complacent he sounds right now.

TT: And Strunk never says that the passive voice must never be used, only that it should be avoided in those situations where the active voice would provide more clarity.

M: Yeah! 

E: No. 

M: I think all writing rules are like, if they work for you, great - if not, try it your own way.

E: See, now he’s just being a bad role model. Or rather an even worse one. 

TT: As they say, you have to know the rules before you break them. And not just be able to recite them rote, but really deeply understand why they are considered rules, and when how and why it is appropriate to break them.

E: Maybe it’s just the current situation, but I’m reminded of those people who keep bleating about how you should “do your own research!” and take horse deworming paste instead of exercising some goddamn common sense and getting vaccinated. 

C: Y’know, it’s like adverbs - uh - if you look at any great writer, they all use adverbs. You will not find a single great writer who avoids adverbs 100% of the time. 

E: ORLY? Ya don’t say? 

TT: It’s like he’s deliberately setting up a strawman argument. NO writing teacher tells you to avoid any and all adverbs 100% with no exceptions. That’s simply not a thing that anybody has ever said. Not even Hemingway or Stephen King.

C: And some of them like Dickens use them rather proFUSEly [seriously; he puts this big emphasis on “FUSE”; it’s pretty funny] but that said the advice to avoid adverbs is out there because unless you know what you’re doing it’s easy for them to become “wriggle words” or extra words which detract from the main punch of your story. 

TT: So he DOES understand that, but deliberately misrepresented it to… make himself look smart?
Second point, Dickens was paid per word. The inference there should be obvious.

C: There are writers like Elmer Leonard who wrote crime fiction - he really did avoid adverbs for the most part. Uh, but every once in a while he’d slip one in when it seemed appropriate. 

M: Yeah. [long awkward silence] ...in your own opinion, what is the most important quality and how does it help you become a better writer?

E: I think she accidentally skipped a word there. If it was me being interviewed I might have asked for some clarification. I doubt Chris will do the same. Actually, while we’re at it if she means what I think she does I’d say one of the most important things when it comes to writing a book/story is that you need to have something to say. Not that there has to be some Big Moral Message - on the contrary. But you need to know what the point of the story you’re recounting is. What interesting idea or theme are you setting out to explore, and why? In short, what is it about - really about? “It would be so cool if I was in the Star Trek universe and also I got the Venom suit and also I was a girl” doesn’t count, and you know it.

TT: I completely agree, it is really difficult to write anything meaningful unless you have something you want to say. And there are very few (possibly zero) books in my personal top 100, across any/all genres, that don’t say something more meaningful than just “Dragons! Yay! Swords! Wow! Magic! Ooh!”

E: Also, on the subject of becoming a better writer in general, you need to be completely honest with yourself about your shortcomings and the most common mistakes you tend to make, then work on doing something about it. And that means listening to people who might not be telling you what you want to hear. It’s not fun and it’s not meant to be fun, but if you can’t grit your teeth and get over yourself, you will never truly improve. And if you can’t manage that, what are you even doing here?

Now let’s see how Paolini handles it, shall we?

C: Persistence. There are plenty of talented writers with unfinished manuscripts on their computers or in their drawers. And there are many other lesser talented authors who are - who have a great work ethic.

E: Actually this is pretty much true. 

C: ...and are productive, and as a result are able to publish consistently. 

E: Well too bad you ain’t one of them, then. Except for the part about lesser- actually, you know what, I’m gonna be classy for once and leave it at that. 

TT: If you were going to say Paolini is consistently bad, I’ll say it for you.

E: We’re a team! 

C: And promote themselves as authors [at least I think that’s what he said]. Persistence beats everything. Persistence plus talent is the perfect combination.

E: Yes, but you’re a mediocre talent at best, and you’re a lazy, LAZY writer, persistence or otherwise. Also this speech sounds rather familiar. How fitting that last time I heard it it was from the mouth of a scumbag who got rich by hijacking other people’s creations.

C: I have always - I don’t know why - but even as a kid I’ve always been rather stubborn and when I start something I like to finish it.

E: Er…

C: And I really really hate to walk away from any project. And that’s - that’s sometimes a detriment, you know-

E: Yeah, no kidding. Giving up on the Space Brick as a bad job and moving on to something else would have been one of the best career decisions of your life. 

TT: If by “something else” you mean Book Five, which might well have revitalised his fanbase and brought new interest into the IC as a whole.

C: -that’s not always a good thing. But in general I think that for any sort of creative person-

E: But you’re not a creative person. If you were you wouldn’t keep on publishing crude mish-mash mockeries of other people’s ideas. If anything one quality of yours that’s always leapt out at me is your distinct lack of any real imagination or creativity. 

C: -but especially for writers, you have to be consistent and persistent. 

E: Yeah, put that on an inspirational plaque and hang it over the fireplace. Maybe throw it on some t-shirts as well. You’re not consistent either, Chris. 

TT: Yes he is - consistently bad. Oh wait, I’ve already used that line.

E: Well hey, if he can shamelessly repeat himself so can we. 

C: And you have to continue pushing forward even when the world is telling you you can’t do it. It is easy for people to tell you you can’t do something.

E: You can’t write. At all. You fucking suck at it, in fact. Hey, that really was easy!

C: They may even be right.

E: You’re too kind. 

C: But you can’t listen to them. 

E: Though in some cases you really really should. “You can’t wrestle with that alligator. You can’t drive; you’re drunk. You can’t go to the cinema; you have COVID. You can’t become a dog; that’s biologically impossible.” But hey, if you’re that determined to make a fool of yourself in public, go right ahead.

TT: “you can’t have this scene of Eragon disembowelling a mortal man who is vastly weaker than him in every way, that will make people think your hero is a villain”

C: Because if you do you’ll never try. 

E: “Kids, you tried your best, and you failed miserably! The lesson is: Never try.” Hey, at least I don’t sound like one of those inspirational desk calendars.

C: And if you try you will learn and grow as an artist and as a person.

E: The evidence on display has clearly demonstrated that this is not true.

TT: No, if you try and fail you will grow. Failure is the best teacher. Success is the hungover substitute teacher who puts 1980s nature documentaries on the TV and then sleeps at the desk all day. Merely trying by itself doesn’t teach anything.

C: And there is always a chance that you are going to succeed. 

E: Gaming the system generally helps too.

C: There are so many more opportunities for everything in the world nowadays - I mean there have never been this many people, there’s never been all this technology, all this wealth - there are opportunities out there!

E: Ladies and gentledudes… you are listening to the pure undistilled voice of privilege. I could put this paragraph in a goddamn textbook on the subject. 

TT: Yeah, this is extremely naive optimism. There are opportunities out there, if you have the luxury of not having to work a day job, aren’t worried about paying rent or bills, and also have lots of contacts and connections who are willing and able to do favours for you. And an unusual amount of luck and various other forms of privilege.

C: And if you listen to the naysayers-

E: Like those jealous assholes on Antishurtugal Reborn, for example. They are just wrong and also jealous.

C: You’ll just do what everyone else tells you to do!

E: Like those damn editors, always telling you to delete the “noble traditional hero snaps an unarmed prisoner’s neck in cold blood” scene. What do they even know? 

TT: Following good advice from people who have learned from their experiences long before you started? That’s for schmucks!

C: And you’ll end up with… outcomes that are average in a way you may not be happy with.

E: Spoken like a true mediocrity who’s blissfully unaware of it. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a spoon and use it to insulate low income housing.

TT: Aside from wishing on a cursed monkey’s paw to become a famous author, Paolini is the very epitome of doing what everyone else does. That’s literally his story writing and worldbuilding method.  He’s about as original as a blunt toothpick. In that there are countless others very similar to it, but the blunt one is slightly less useful.

[a long, LONG silence]

M: [sounding a bit hesitant] Yeah… yeah, I love that. 

C: That said, and I think it’s worth saying-

E: PLEASE be about to qualify what you just said with something that sounds even vaguely self-aware. 

C: If you try something that is unusual you run the risk of failure.

E: *headdesk*

C: -of falling flat on your face in a way you wouldn’t necessarily do if you did things the more traditional way. But that said, doing things the traditional way is no guarantee of safety either. As we’ve seen with the pandemic and with everything else, the universe has a way of throwing curveballs at us all. So you can live in the most safe way possible and that ultimately may be more risky in the long run than daring to achieve something.

E: Achieve WHAT, exactly? He really thinks he’s (deservedly) this big inspirational figure, doesn’t he? God that’s depressing. 

TT: Luck, nepotism, and then industry connections. That’s how he got where he is. Talent and hard work? What are those?

M: Yeah… I think that’s… awesome advice. [No joke, she’s sounding really unenthusiastic right now, like this isn’t going at all how she was hoping it would] I was just kinda like nodding.

C: [laughs over the top of her, again]

TT: I’ve noticed Paolini has a habit of talking over his interviewers, if he thinks he’s more famous, talented, or richer than them. Interestingly, he doesn’t talk over people if they are more famous and respected than he is.

M: Awesome, like, giving me the motivation! 

C: Well, I will temper all that by saying I’m a really bad person-

E: ...nah, too easy.

C: ...to look to for advice on how to succeed in the publishing world, because, you know, I had a really unusual path to publication and I’ve had a really unusual publication history. You know, the sales figures for the Inheritance trilogy are not what you can expect from any book, really. In fact I probably will not write a novel that sells like Eragon in the rest of my life. Um, I have a great readership, great audience, the books are doing well, but Eragon was lightning in a bottle. So you know, anyone who’s listening to this should take all this with a grain of salt - I also because I’m speaking from the perspective of having this extremely unusual experience, and I’m aware that it was unusual, and that’s why I’m saying this.

E: FINALLY some goddamn honesty, and yet he still somehow manages to make it sound really self-congratulatory. 

TT: It’s refreshing, but notice how he doesn’t actually acknowledge that his success was really down to blind luck, and if Carl Wossname had been less respected at Knopf, or Michelle had been less receptive to it, or Carl’s stepson had had better taste in fantasy, the Paolini family could very well have bankrupted themselves trying to turn Eragon into a success selling the self-published version out of the back of their car.

E: Indeed he rather suspiciously never mentions it at all. 

M: Yeah. Well, I think it’s always that you learn from your [advantage?] too. Usually a lot of stories I’ve heard about publication have been ‘it took me five hundred tries and I got one answer’, right?

E: Yeah, we tend to refer to the long periods of hard work and frustration as, among other things, part of the process of earning your spurs. For one thing it weeds out the people who aren’t really prepared to be in it for the long haul, but more importantly it encourages you to go away and hone your craft rather than just publishing the first piece of painfully mediocre quasi fanfiction you hacked up in your spare time because you were bored. 

M: See and-

C: [loudly interrupting and talking over the top of her] And, and I was prepared for that!

E: Um, no, you clearly weren’t.

TT: Prior to Carl Wossname (edit: Hiaasen) getting a copy of it, Paolini has never indicated that he had sent or planned to send it to any publishing houses or agents. The Paolini family just immediately went to the printing press in their back room and started pumping out copies to sell. Paolini never intended to submit it anywhere, and was therefore never prepared to get hundreds of rejection letters. 

M: [laughs at him, and I don’t blame her] Yeah, well, sometimes good things happen and sometimes you learn from the 499 times you fail. 

C: And I was ready for what I thought was going to be the traditional path to getting published. So I wrote Eragon as a test novel. That is, I didn’t think it was going to get published. I thought it was just - for me it was my way of learning how to write three, four hundred pages/

E: Well that explains a lot.

TT: And that’s a great and wonderful thing. Practice novel writing by writing a couple of novels before you seriously consider trying to produce someone publishable. I recommend it, it’s a great way to develop your authorial style and voice, experiment with different approaches and narrative styles and genres, and basically learn about yourself as a writer. In that sense, I blame the parents for self-publishing it and then dragging their son around the country to try to become successful based on his hobby at the time.

E: Same here. Not only did he miss out on an important developmental stage but it also left him with a MASSIVE ego problem, both of which proved to be major impediments toward his ever becoming halfway good at what is (nominally) his profession. 

C: And I figured I’d write it, and then I’d go and write something a bit more serious and mature and I’d have to write two to three to four other books before I got published, because that was what I was hearing from all these published authors. “Oh, my books didn’t get picked up until my third, my fourth, my fifth”. So that was my game plan. 

E: ...and then along came Mummy and Daddy with dollar signs in their eyes. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3SZ5sIMY6o

TT: Like I said. If his parents had just let him get on with things and kept their noses out of it, he could have turned into a decent author. 

C: And then as it turned out Eragon got picked up, which just kind of shocked me.

E: Um, your parents self-published it and dragged you around the countryside promoting the damn thing. It’s not quite the same situation, you know. 

C: Um, but that was where I was planning to go. 

E: And he just leaves it at that. You shameless liar you.
TT: I just realised something: In earlier interviews before To Sleep, Paolini always talked about how he started writing Eragon because he was bored, and never planned to become a career writer. Now, it was his "game plan" all along to get published and become a famous author. I smell a retcon.

[another long pause]

M: ...yeah. So tell me, how is writing different now than when you were a teen? 

E: Here comes a load of hogwash. 

C: Ooh, um… it’s more serious, because it’s my job. 

E: If it’s your job then you need a better supervisor and more stringent annual staff performance evaluations. 

TT: Four novels in 20 years, round it up to about 1.13 million words. Call it 6 hours a day for 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year for 20 years... 24000 hours. That's 48 words an hour, or a little less than 300 words per day.

C: And it is difficult maybe to transition from something that was a hobby and then it becomes your full-time job.

E: Sporker Vivisector once remarked that if Paolini is anything like his characters he probably spends most of his time just faffing around until someone reminds him he’s supposed to be an author so he goes and bangs out a few lines before going back to watching TV. Given how utterly disjointed Inheritance was, even between individual paragraphs, I’m inclined to have my suspicions too. 

TT: Paolini doesn’t know the meaning of the term “full time”. If he ever did get a job his mind would be blown by the concept of scheduled lunch breaks. 

C: You can’t just do it whenever you want to; you really have to focus on it and treat it seriously, so there’s that. Um, I’d say the biggest difference is that with experience comes more of the ability to accomplish the things I want to accomplish. 

E: Oh dear lord.

C: So when I was starting out, if I wanted to write a funny scene or a sad scene or a scary scene I might have been able to do it, but I wanna say it would be as much chance as skill, but it would have been much more on the “chance” side of things. Whether or not what I wrote worked-

E: It didn’t.

C: -has always been a bit of a question mark. Nowadays I’d say the chances of something I write working out the way I want it to is 80-90%

E: Don’t kid yourself. You’re still making us crack up laughing when you’re trying to be Dramatic and Meaningful™ and inflicting suicidal depression and ragefits whenever you try to be funny.  

TT: 50% would be generous. Judging from To Sleep, I would say he comes close to achieving what he wanted to do with each scene, but never quite gets there. 

C: It doesn’t always happen, but I know enough that I know how to write that scary scene or that sad scene or y’know a fast scene or a slow scene or whatever. I know the techniques I can employ. And that makes a big difference. Uh, and I’ve also gained a much greater appreciation for, y’know, plotting and working things out beforehand. Which I did a lot of for the Inheritance Cycle. 

E: Oh come on. Who the hell does he even think he’s fooling? He’s either lying here or just plain delusional. 

TT: Still trying to convince us that a couple months of playing around with worldbuilding as a teenager is the same as years of development and experimentation.

E: Harhar, it is to laugh. 

C: But I’ve re-learned how important that is with my most recent book. And, uh, that [laugh] that is so helpful if you can do that.

E: ...you can’t. I have seen not one single jot of evidence to suggest otherwise. God this is embarrassing. 

TT: The plot of To Sleep was a derailed train on a frozen lake, lurching and skidding all over the place with no clear direction or goals.

E: And we all know what happens to large vehicles which screw around on frozen lakes: they fall through and sink straight to the murky depths, never to be seen again.