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antishurtugal_reborn2022-08-14 09:56 pm
Paolini Guest Podcast: Styling Up Your World, Part 5
Part 1: https://antishurtugal-reborn.dreamwidth.org/262083.html
Part 2: https://antishurtugal-reborn.dreamwidth.org/262772.html
Part 3: https://antishurtugal-reborn.dreamwidth.org/266299.html
Part 4: https://antishurtugal-reborn.dreamwidth.org/276539.html
Quick recap, Paolini has spend almost 30 minutes crapping on about himself, and then another 30 minutes condescendingly giving advice to a teen author who sent in her work to be critiqued.
We continue:
---
P: I think as she moves forward to her next story, that will be something to consider - how to structure her writing.
M: Yeah! [advertising and sponsorship spiel I’m just going to skip over]
M: …this week’s focus is worldbuilding, plotting and style. Sometimes starting your story can be the most intimidating part, but Christopher is going to give us some tips on how to develop your world and create a story that is unique to you.
E: Next, we will be interviewing a fish who will give us some useful tips on the finer points of riding a bicycle.
TT: “unique to you”? There is not one detail of Paolini’s world that is unique to him. Which, I guess, makes his worlds uniquely un-unique.
M: What is the first thing you do after you’ve come up with a story idea? Does worldbuilding come first, or does the plot?
P: Both! Uh… they’re completely, uh, interconnected. This is like the old question - what’s more important, character or story? And there are certainly stories that are more character based and there are stories that are more plot based, by which I mean they’re really focused more on the events that happen than on the characters themselves.
E: Wow, really? No shit? Thank goodness he took the time to explain this extremely complicated concept to us morons.
TT: Paolini demonstrating his ability to use a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. “There are some stories that are character-based, and some stories that are plot-based”.
I would personally argue that plot cannot happen in a void, so worldbuilding should come first and the plot develops out of that, as a consequence of the way the world is set up, but other writers may think differently. I’m primarily a worldbuilder, anyway, so I’m admittedly biased.
P: But if you’re honest about the world you’re creating, the characters you’re creating, and the events that are happening, they all affect each other.
E: Unless they’re introduced and then dropped forever, of course. *whistles*
TT: Paolini rarely, or very inconsistently, applies this in his own work. Very little of the plot is affected by the worldbuilding or characters, to the point that both have been retconned to fit the plot.
P: So maybe you start with your characters. Well, the things they do change who they are.
E: Um, no. The things they do show you who they are. What’s that line from BoJack Horseman? “I don’t think I believe in ‘deep down’. I kind of think all you are is just the things that you do”.
Now let us all pause to consider the things that Eragon, Roran and Nasuada do.
Yeah.
TT: Characters do not exist within a void, either, the things they do are informed by their culture, history, beliefs, moral priorities, allegiances, etc. etc., all of which are things that need to be established via worldbuilding before the characters come into the picture. Otherwise you get some sort of blank-slate character who exists seemingly independently of the world they inhabit, and can temporarily take on any characteristics they need for a given scene without any regard for their history or experiences. Hey, that sounds familiar. *cough* Eragon *cough* Kira *cough*
P: And also who they are dictates the things they do.
E: Which in the case of almost every character you ever wrote says nothing good about them. Or you either for that matter, for insisting that they still somehow qualify as “good” after all the repulsive crimes they committed.
A: Oh, but they’re all *justified,* don’t you know, because it was in the service of *the greater good.* Yeah, no, I call bullshit on that hard.
TT: Only if “who they are” is actually established and consistent. Eragon proclaiming that he has “the same right as a King” is not consistent with his upbringing as the bastard orphan nephew of a peasant farmer, raised in a tiny highlands village with almost no regular contact with the outside world. Roran killing 193 armed soldiers with a ball peen hammer and laughing about it is not consistent with his upbringing as the illiterate son of a peasant farmer with no combat training. Eragon watching peasant huts being burned (presumably with peasants still inside) IS NOT CONSISTENT with him being raised in a farm house on the outskirts of a village full of farmers and peasants!
P: The world you’re creating-
E: Or cobbling together out of mismatched parts you saw on TV or read in someone else’s book, whichever.
P: -will shape what is possible to have happen in that world.
E: That is until some element of the setting you introduced suddenly becomes too difficult or too inconvenient for your lazy ass to write consistently, so you immediately just ignore it or retcon it out of existence.
A: Or he just forgets about it.
TT: Or you paint yourself into a corner and the only way out is to change the fundamental rules of how your world works because you can’t think of any other solutions.
P: And what happens in that world will change the world. So once I have an idea for a story [Mary Sue gets cool power-up for free and becomes Awesome!] the first thing I like to do-
E: Is start mentally calculating how much those suckers at Tor are going to pay me in advance after I send them the manuscript?
TT: Is read up on the classics of the genre to find ideas and scenes I can steal?
P: Now I’ve never published a story set in the real world, so all of this is going to be about fantasy and science fiction.
E: Genres into which you have introduced precisely zero innovation or good world building.
P: The first thing I like to do is to decide what things in this world, or universe, are different from reality as we know it. Because that is going to determine what is possible. So if it’s fantasy it might be “is there magic? What does the magic allow?”
E: Dude, you’ve ‘created’ precisely ONE fantasy setting, and the magic ‘allowed’ whatever the fuck you wanted it to allow, as and when it suited you.
TT “Is there magic” is the laziest worldbuilding question. Sorry, second laziest, behind “Is it fantasy?”
P: What does it not allow? Um, if it’s science fiction it might be the technology - what does the technology permit? What does it not permit?
E: Thankyou, Captain Obvious.
TT: “and how can I conveniently forget all these limitations when they get in the way of the plot?”
P: What are the physics of this new universe allow for or not allow for. That tells me a whole lot of interesting things, like with the technology of science fiction it might tell me the travel times, it might tell me how long it takes to get from Point A to Point B, and that’s going to tell me a lot of things that are possible or not possible in my story.
E: How on earth is he able to say all this with a straight face??
TT: As if Paolini has ever done serious reading about physics and how it relates to cosmogony. Also, a good story should not depend on travel times between locations. Good stories are, at their core, about people and their interactions. Travel time between locations is a distraction at best, pointless worldbuilding busywork that doesn’t actually add anything compelling to the story. With a few exceptions, of course, such as stories where the journey is the story, or for scenes where one party is desperately awaiting the arrival of another. But for To Sleep, or the Inheritance Cycle, 99% of the travelling scenes could have been completely handwaved with a line like “some time later, they arrived”.
P: If, if I could travel faster than light then we could go to different star systems. If you can’t travel faster than light it would take thousands of years. With magic, y’know, can you move mountains with your mind? Do you need to pray to gods in order to cast spells? I mean there’s a whole list of things that might be possible. Uh, along with that you can think about… what the society, what the civilisations of your setting are, uh, and then of course I start thinking about my characters, and the events themselves. It all starts tying in together very very closely. Once I know the technology in the setting I can start thinking about the actual events and how that ties into the characters and who they are, and it all ends up being this massive mess…
E: Yeah, no shit.
TT: Paolini describing his worldbuilding as “a massive mess” is the most accurate, honest, and self-aware he has EVER been. Even if it wasn’t meant that way.
A: So what I’m hearing is, he does the worldbuilding first. That was the question he was asked, and he’s just gone on a massive winding diatribe instead of giving a straight answer.
P: …of details and information.
E: Which you clearly have no idea what to do with.
P: It’s actually very helpful to keep it organised.
E: Wow, again - no shit? (By hiring a personal assistant and making her do it, naturally)
TT: this just in, it’s helpful to organise information. Somebody tell all the encyclopedia-writers, database programmers, and librarians of the world.
P: I write a lot in notebooks when I’m doing my world-building.
E: It’s clearly not helping much.
TT: I suspect he has a LOT of different notebooks that he scribbles in at random, which is why he can’t keep any of his details straight.
P: Then I transfer the relevant information into word files, and I order it in such a way that I can skim through it and go “okay! Here are my locations, here’s my magic, here’s my technology, here are the religions of this place, the governments of this place… it might seem like a lot of work, and it is, but you can do a lot of this in like a week.
E: Well that explains a lot.
A: Eh, I could probably make a decent sketch of a setting in a week… but that’s a sketch of a setting.
TT: He talks like he’s done this a lot, instead of really only twice in his career. Once for Alagaesia, and once for To Sleep. If he does worldbuild for fun, his published results certainly don’t show it.
P: And a week of work prior to writing a book you might be spending months on or a year or longer is not a whole lot.
E: Uh, yeah.
TT: That’s why better writers than Paolini tend to spend a lot more than just a week on their worldbuilding and character-building. I mean, maybe someone like Steven King could knock out a decent novel in a weekend, but he usually sets his stories in the real world with only one or two magic elements, which cuts down on wordbuilding enormously.
If you want to construct an original and compelling world that isn’t a stock-standard Medieval Europe But With Magic archetype, you need to put a bit of time and effort into thinking things through.
P: But gives you a massive payoff. And gives you so many tools so when you’re actually writing you’ll be able to just put in little details and be able to tie things together and it just makes it a lot, lot easier.
M: Yeah!
E: She sure does say that a lot.
TT: “Little details” like long paragraphs of pointless exposition or description that add nothing and go nowhere, or maybe a side quest that adds nothing to the main story and is eventually dropped when you’ve grown tired of exploring that particular worldbuilding element.
M: So from what I’ve heard, I went to the [something] conference and heard a little bit from you before, but I’ve heard you talk about asking yourself questions to build your world.
P: Mmhmm.
E: Clearly they were the wrong questions.
TT: The thing about asking questions is that you can’t stop just as the first level, or even the second level or questions. “Is there magic?” leads to all sorts of other questions about what that implies about society, architecture, religion, economy, travel, morality, and so on. The existence of magic impacts every other element in your worldbuilding, and you should not stop just as “what super cool powers does it give my self-insert character?”
M: But I’m kind of wondering what kind of questions do you ask yourself to start building a world that’s, like, very intricate, and as we talk about very close [something] parts of the plot and the characters. [she’s kind of mumbling here]
P: [cutting her off, again] So I’m a big believer in internal consistency.
E: WHAT.
*rewinds and listens to that again*
P: Internal consistency.
E: Internal. Consistency.
*rewinds again with the volume raised*
P: INTERNAL CONSISTENCY
E: I can’t even laugh right now. I just… WHAT?! Oh dear lord.
A: He didn’t even wait for her to finish her question and now he’s rambling on about something he is demonstrably bad at. This is not a good look, Paolini.
TT: Paolini has been incredibly rude to his host in this podcast. Interrupting, talking over, saying what he had pre-planned to say without actually listening to the question she’s asking. I would not call him a gracious guest.
E: Me neither. He sounds like a horrible person to interview.
P: …mainly because it helps to maintain your reader’s suspension of disbelief.
E: Why you… you goddamn turniphead.
P: Uh, if you break your reader’s suspension of disbelief, it’s going to be very hard for them to care about what’s happening.
E: Indeed, and if all your characters are hateful, boring assholes it’s going to have the exact same effect. Not that you let that get in your way, Mr “No, no, I just HAVE to put in this useless scene where my ‘traditional hero’ murders an unarmed prisoner in cold blood for incredibly contrived reasons!”
P: Because they’re going to feel like they’re seeing something that’s artificial - that’s not natural, that’s not real, like “those characters wouldn’t behave like that” - that’s an easy breaking of, uh, immersion.
E: And he continues to condescendingly over-explain everything while skating perilously close to becoming self-aware. Good fuck.
A: Christopher Paolini wouldn’t know self-awareness if it walked up wearing cross-gartered yellow stockings and slapped him with a dead flounder.
P: Or “if they could do this in the world, why haven’t they done it before?”
E: I’m beginning to feel unnecessary. The guy is all but sporking himself right now.
TT: Has Christopher Paolini even READ the collected works of *checks notes*... Christopher Paolini?
A: I suspect he hasn’t. At least, not since he wrote them.
Rereading your old work is actually a pretty good exercise, by the way. It lets you spot mistakes you’ve made and reminds you of anything you forgot to put in your notes. I reread the published chapters of Consequence every time I sit down to start a new one.
E: I do the same thing. When I sit down to write, I ALWAYS read over what I wrote the previous day and sometimes further back. Or if it’s something I haven’t touched in a while, I re-read the entire thing.
P: “Why does this suddenly get mentioned now, and maybe it never gets mentioned again.”
E: Is… is he just straight-up trolling us right now? Surely no-one is THIS deluded. Come on! I mean Jesus H Christ this is just… argh.
P: Those sorts of things are problematic.
E: He is. He’s trolling us.
TT: a clueless and talentless Paolini I can accept. A genius mastermind deliberately writing the most horribly-developed fantasy series that he could conceive of, while acting completely sincere about it for decades? That’s… too much.
A: Personally, I can 100% believe he’s this deluded. What he’s doing here, what he’s been doing more or less this whole time, is parroting things he knows are Good Writing AdviceTM but hasn’t really thought on enough to recognize how he’s gone against them. It’s completely in line with his general writing style, too: he imitates better works without understanding what made the devices in those works good. I think I did a whole post about how that applies to his poetry once.
E: Someone he actually listens to REALLY needs to call him out on this, instead of standing there nodding and smiling and enabling the absolute nonsense he’s spouting.
P: It’s actually easier for people to accept the existence of dragons than to accept characters getting something small wrong, and by small I mean like you show someone doing backflips in full armour, or saddling a horse wrong. These are things that people have experience with generally or specifically, and so they know if you get it wrong.
E: That is indeed correct, and it’s precisely why people picked up on shit like Roran somehow being able to perform fancy trick riding stunts he never learned on a horse with no training for it and later shrugging off 50 lashes like it was nothing, and both him and Eragon suddenly talking like educated nobles right out of nowhere. Then there’s the twelve month pregnancy, the fact that it apparently stays Spring for over five months, the horses who are somehow able to gallop all night without dropping dead AND I COULD FUCKING GO ON, MATE.
A: You know, it’s funny that he uses backflips in full armor as an example, because depending on the type of armor and the level of Super Strength we’re talking about, you could finesse that one. A Paoelf doing backflips in full leather armor, for example, or even full chainmail.
E: As a matter of fact, I’ve seen video footage of a medieval re-enactment guy running, jumping over obstacles, and doing push-ups and chin-ups, all while wearing a full set of plate armour. People majorly overestimate how much of an encumbrance that sort of getup is, and especially on someone with training and experience.
P: Dragons? Okay, dragons exist - but you cooked that food wrong!
E: My god, and he’s just digging himself in even deeper.
P: So now your characters are dying of food poisoning.
E: If only.
P: So no no no! Now I can’t believe the story!
E: You’re right. We can’t.
P: Um, but as far as the questions…
E: And he finally gets back to the point. And I’ve had about as much as I can take for the moment. Epistler out.
[after a long break…]
E: A VERY long break, which indeed could easily have lasted forever if I hadn’t been stuck at home on a boring rainy afternoon and felt like doing something that at least seemed productive.
P: To me it goes back to being REALLY rigorous with how you think about your world. And this just takes experience, you’ll get better at it, I’m certainly better at it now than when I started. Questions such as… [long pause] …who are these characters?
E: Virtually interchangeable?
TT: Telling that he couldn’t actually think of any pertinent questions. He has no idea what he’s rambling about now, and is just riffing off the cuff.
P: Where do they live? How do they make their money? How do they support themselves - how do they put food on the table? What is the food? Where does it come from? Uh… you know, I’m gonna get really really basic here for a second. There’s an old saying from Robert Heinlein - classic science fiction author. Which is “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” I think that’s how he put it. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, which means you never get anything for free.
E: NO WAY! Really?! I guess he’s not counting the free ride he got in his career, and the free pass he keeps receiving for his plagiarism and bad writing.
P: So where is the energy in your world coming from?
E: Pulled directly from Ye Butte?
P: Y’know, if it’s technology… how are the lights being powered? If it’s fantasy where does the food on the table come from?
E: A more experienced interviewer would probably realise he’s just rambling on to no purpose at this point and make an attempt at getting the interview back on track. Alas, that is not going to happen in this case.
TT: That’s why Paolini only does interviews with teenaged podcasters who don’t have much experience at controlling interviewees.
E: That or his starry-eyed fanboys or fellow members of the Fantasy Bro Club who desperately need to support him in the name of mutual validation.
P: How are the animals being fed? All of this stuff… you can go too far with all this stuff and spend all your life world-building and never write anything.
E: Oh do fuck off.
TT: There is a vast gap between “all your life” and “the bare minimum”. I know it probably isn’t, but I feel like this could have been directed at critics who complain about his lack of worldbuilding. “what do you want from me, a worldbuilding project that takes 40 years to to go nowhere?” No, Christopher, we just want you to do anything more than ‘fuck-all’.
A: Or, if you are doing more than fuck-all, we would like to see evidence of such in your actual writing.
P: Getting some basic answers really helps everything hang together.
E: Once you know where the food on the table comes from you’re done, apparently.
P: So that when your characters go to a city, for example, in a fantasy world, you’re gonna wonder hey how do the people here… grow their food?
E: Man, he’s really hung up on the whole food thing. Maybe he missed lunch that day.
TT: Also something he completely ignores in the entire IC. Sure he had some brief mentions about logistical issues of feeding a massive moving army… while also having his main characters attend lavish feasts every other day.
P: Y’know is it a… is it a trading city, a religiously based city, is it a governmental centre, is it, y’know, what level of technology…
E: That is not how cities work. What, so because Jerusalem is a religious centre that means it doesn’t do any trade or have any government buildings?
A: Those three things do often overlap. Cities that have a lot of natural resources and/or access to trade routes tend to become wealthy and culturally dominant and thus end up as governmental and religious centers. You do get your occasional small farming village that becomes a religious center as a result of, say, being the birthplace of a religious figure or the local church getting their hands on a fancy (alleged) relic, but for the most part, your governmental, religious, and trade centers are going to be the same cities. Take a look at Rome, for example.
A: Also, I bet his examples for “trading city,” “religiously-based city,” and “governmental centre” would be Teirm, Dras-Leona, and Uru’baen, respectively. Which just shows how massively oversimplified his setting is, that these cities basically only have one job. Hell, throw Gil’ead on that pile too as “the military city.”
E: Exactly what I was thinking, and note too that for some goddamn reason the Helgrind religion only exists in Dras-Leona. Not one single church or believer is ever seen outside of that one city. What the Helgrind kind of sense does that make??
P: You can do a lot of this fairly fast by putting some thought into it.
E: No you can’t and no you didn’t.
TT: You can, IF you ask the right kinds of questions and actually think about the answers. Throwing out whatever kneejerk answer you think of on the top of your head for each question can build a passable setting for a one-shot D&D campaign, but checklist-based or laundry-list worldbuilding rarely works well for developing the deeper sense of a place that is lived in, with history and architecture and a thriving culture of people who have lived and worked there for generations.
P: So it all hangs together, and you get your unique elements from the things that you’ve changed from the real world.
E: What “unique elements”?
A: Dragons, of course!
P: Whether that’s magic, technology… social elements like you’ve created a new religion or you’ve created a new governing system. And then you can think about how that might change how people think. And one thing which is really hard to do but is wonderful if you can pull it off is if someone is raised in a different environment, um, is going to think differently about things.
E: Then why does Eragon, the kid who grew up in a medieval fantasy land and can’t read, consistently behave like a spoiled upper middle class American teenager? Even after he turns into a pretentious bloodthirsty psychopath he still whines and complains about minor inconveniences like missing a meal or not getting enough sleep. In fact, why do ALL of his characters act like bratty spoiled upper middle class American teenagers with massive, MASSIVE entitlement issues? It’s a tough one all right. *snort*
TT: to be fair, he did say “if” you can pull it off. He didn’t claim that he could. Or did.
P: …is going to have different opinions about things, and is not going to behave like you or I, or a modern person put into that situation.
E: *bursts into a fit of hysterical laughter* THIS IS THE SAME FUCKING GUY WHO HAD HIS THOUSAND YEAR OLD ELF AND DRAGON DROPPING MIDWESTERN AMERICAN PHRASES LIKE “MOST ANYONE”! The same fucking guy whose “poor farmboy” hero whines about not getting prime rib for dinner! The same fucking guy who… HAHAHAHAH!
P: If there’s a religion, to use as an example, if there’s a religion in your world unless there’s a reason why your character might be too cynical to believe it, then they’d believe it, and if they believe it then let them take it seriously.
A: Says the man who never actually fleshed out the human religion(s) in Alaglag and just kind of tossed in random tidbits whenever it suited his desired narrative at the time, regardless of what he’d previously said or shown.
E: Or just shove in a bunch of entry level modern day atheism crap, whichever.
TT: Another nice bit of writing advice that Paolini has not only disregarded but contradicted in all his written works
P: Just like people in the past did when they were believing in Thor and Odin.
E: Um, there are people today who still believe in Thor and Odin. It’s a recognised religion in Scandinavia or somewhere in that region.
A: It’s called Ásatrú!
P: Stuff like that. It wasn’t pretend for them, it was real for them.
E: You condescending little asshole.
TT: Is he implying what I think he’s implying? That sounds awfully close to implying that modern day religious people are playing pretend. In contrast to “back then”, when they weren’t pretending.
E: I certainly found it very suspicious that he chose to bring up what he apparently assumed was a dead religion rather than, say, Christianity.
P: So all of those things are important to keep in mind.
E: Something I’m keeping in mind is that you suck.
P: I’m thinking of a movie I saw… if your character grew up imprisoned in a cell in a castle and manages to escape at the beginning of the story and is now going to explore the world-
E: -they’d still be way less useless than Eragon?
P: -really think what someone would be like if they grew up in a prison cell. Y’know, they’re not going to be normal.
E: Thank goodness we’ve got you here to impart these astonishing insights. I never would have figured that one out all on my lonesome.
P: [laughing] They’re not just going to react the way any normal person does.
E: …that’s not funny.
TT: Paolini seems to think all mental illness is either scary sociopaths, or harmless “lol random” personality quirks.
E: One of the many reasons behind my astute “you suck” observation.
P: So trying to pay attention to what’s actually happening in the world and then asking those questions that keep leading you in interesting directions - and I like questions!
E: As long as they’re not questions like “when is book five coming out??” or “are you ever going to own up to your blatant plagiarism?” BLOCKED. Also I don’t believe you. “Full-time asker of questions” my ass.
A: I’m going to say that I think he does ask questions… they’re just usually the wrong questions.
E: And he doesn’t pursue the answers.
A: Oh no, he definitely does pursue the answers. Which is why he never gets around to figuring out what the right questions are, because he went down a rabbit hole asking himself the wrong question. I do this too at times, I know how to spot it.
P: [long pause] Because [noise like further suppressed laughter] you’ve created a couple of basic assumptions and then you ask yourself questions about the world, and you have some general questions you always ask yourself-
E: Oh my god is he STILL blathering on? You’ve made your point! Shut up and let poor Madeline get a goddamn word in edgeways! Nobody except you is in love with the sound of your own annoying voice! Gah!
P: And then you… by answering them you will learn things about your world that you never really considered, that’s why I love this as a technique…
E: SHUT UP
P: You actually pull new pieces of information out of your brain. It forces you to create things you wouldn’t otherwise create.
E: Right now I’m imagining a world in which this insufferable tool was suddenly and mysteriously rendered mute. And it’s already a far more interesting story than anything he ever came up with in his entire undeserved career.
P: And there’s always going to be this temptation to… I know I’m ranting here…
E: No you’re not. Ranting is something you do when you’re pissed off. It’s what I’m doing right now. What you’re doing is failing to grasp the value of brevity.
You gotta love how he’s still misusing words even after all this time.
TT: Rambling, not ranting. He’s completely lost any semblance of a point and has started beating the proverbial dead horse, while at the same time trying to dig his way out of the hole he dug himself into. To mix metaphors.
Cue Simpsons gif: 
And or a different Simpsons gif: 
E: I would also have accepted “blathering”.
P: There’s always the temptation to gloss over the things that are difficult or get in the way of the story you want to tell.
E: You’d know because YOU DO THAT ALL THE TIME. Oh my GOD.
TT: Paolini glosses over the story in favour of focusing too much on details that get in the way.
A: As I said earlier: he asks himself questions, he just asks the wrong ones. And then he puts the answers in, completely failing to realize that they’re completely irrelevant to what he’s actually trying to accomplish.
P: And a lot of the time those are things other creators, other writers, gloss over.
E: Well hello there Mr Pot. Did you remember to call the kettle black this fine morning?
P: But my experience has been that if you delve into those things you’ll end up with a really unique - I hate saying unique - setting.
E: Our sojourn in Opposite Land has now entered its fifth bewildering hour.
P: And unique story, y’know. As an example-
TT: To butcher a Blackadder quote, Paolini wouldn't recognise a unique story if it painted itself purple and danced naked on a harpsichord singing 'unique stories are here again'.
E: If he uses one of his own books here I’m going to scream.
P: -digging into how your magic functions.
A: IT FUCKING DOESN’T. Or rather, it functions however you need it to for the plot, regardless of whatever you’ve established previously.
P: Or with science fiction, I really dug into how faster than light travel works.
E: [screams] To absolutely no purpose, yes.
TT: To no purpose, because it was a completely irrelevant detail that had no impact on the story whatsoever.
P: Which is something a lot of authors skip over.
E: I wonder why.
TT: probably because they’re busy working on details that actually affect the story and characters. Like, you know, giving the characters a compelling reason to be in the story.
E: Other than, say, to fill a cynical diversity quota checklist.
P: And I ended up with something that I feel is, um… adds a lot to my story.
E: You felt wrong.
P: …I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
E: [headdesk]
M: I-
P: [interrupting AGAIN] Long answer to a short question - hopefully that makes sense.
A: LET HER TALK, DAMMIT!
M: No, that did.
E: Young lady, I am impressed by your considerable powers of diplomacy and the fact that you managed to sit through all that.
M: And now I’m wondering how do you do all that without totally infodumping?
P: [laughs]
E: [laughs at Paolini]
P: It is one of the great challenges of speculative fiction.
E: Indeed it is! Brace yourselves for an avalanche of more bullshit.
P: Infodumping… we’ve gotten better as a genre. If you look at fantasy from the 1980s
E: Or… well, you know.
P: And the 1990s, there’s a lot more infodumping than you see now. Readers have gotten smarter about this, so you don’t have to, uh, overdo it. There’s a couple of different approaches that are helpful. One is to have a character who doesn’t know a lot about the world. So as the character learns more about the world, the reader learns more about the world. Eragon’s a good example of this.
E: Eragon isn’t a good example of anything except for how not to write a sympathetic protagonist. In this particular instance, it works very poorly indeed because he’s ignorant and an apathetic, incurious dullard. We missed out on SO MUCH because Eragon never bothered to take an interest in it.
TT: There is absolutely no reason why Eragon shouldn’t know more about the world than he does. You know what’s a good example of the Naive Reader Stand-In learning about the world as they journey through it? The main character from “The Wings of a Falcon” by Cynthia Voigt. Literally an ignorant orphan raised on an isolated island in a cult that forbids knowledge of the outside world, who runs away and then has to learn about the world outside as he tries to get as far away from the cult-island as possible. Eragon may be from a small farming community at the northern edge of the empire, but there is trade and connection with nearby towns and cities, a semi-regular visit from travelling merchants, and enough contact with nearby cities to do things like arrange apprenticeships. Not to mention presumed regular visits from Imperial tax collectors and army recruiters. There is NO reason he should be ignorant of how the empire functions. Later books even state that the town has stories about elves that he should have heard enough of to be familiar with an elf when he sees one. The only reason Eragon knows nothing is that he is the absolute worst kind of tourist: a bored, incurious teenager more impressed with his own thumbs than with the world around him, and on top of that a dullard who doesn’t ask questions and accepts everything he is told on face value without a second thought.
A: Honestly, in light of all that, Eragon’s complete lack of knowledge sort of supports my whole “Garrow was controlling and abusive and deliberately isolated Roran and Eragon” theory. We do know that he knew how to read and deliberately didn’t teach them…
E: And lest we forget, Eragon is a self-insert and look at how Paolini was raised. And by what kind of person.
TT: And another thing. The Riders have only been gone for 100 years. Even in medieval lifespans, there should be people alive whose grandparents (or even parents) saw the Riders, so this whole thing about the Riders being mostly-lost distant legend preserved only by one storyteller who nobody believes is just inconsistent with the timelines. The past existence of elves and dragon riders should be common knowledge, especially among the older population. A person in their 60s at the start of the story would have been able to hear first-hand accounts about the riders from their grandparents.
E: As I said in a spork, it’s basically the equivalent of no-one remembering World War 2. And yet we get both that and Galby being referred to as an “ancient foe”, etc. Paolini should have made it 500 years ago at the very least.
P: Another approach is to only show the readers what the characters have reason to think about.
E: Well you failed at that too, because Eragon only thinks about what the author wants him to think about, rather than the things you would expect him to naturally be focused on. For one thing he devotes precisely zero effort to learning more about the arch villain he’s theoretically fighting in favour of wangsting about creature comforts and pretending to feel bad about all the murdering he does.
TT: There are several times in the series when Eragon knows things he cannot possibly know, because Paolini forgot that he and Eragon are not the same person. It’s not just that Paolini can’t see the story from any other character’s perspective except Eragon’s; he can’t even see the story strictly from Eragon’s perspective. He sees it from his own top-down perspective as if he were playing Eragon in a computer game.
E: And even though Eragon is his self-insert, you can tell he doesn’t have any empathy for him. He doesn’t seem to have any concept of what Eragon’s situation would actually be like or how a real person as young and sheltered as him would react to it. Instead, as I myself once put it, Eragon is just an action figure who only exists to live out his author’s childish power fantasies. Paolini never really treats him like he’s a human being.
P: There’s a science fiction author by the name of C.J.Cherryh, she’s been around for a long time and written a lot of good stuff. She writes extremely limited 3rd person POV, which means if she writes a character who lives on a space station with a best friend who’s an alien, and you the reader might not realise either of those things until you’re halfway through the book.
E: And then there’s you with your horribly non-impartial narrator and inconsistent character POVs which result in the protagonists gaining author knowledge at random.
TT: (for the record, Epistler added all of her comments first, but I added my above comment before I had read down this far. Same point, but we both arrived at it independently).
E: Well, you know how the saying goes. “Great minds think alike, but fools seldom differ.” ;)
P: Because the main character never thinks about the fact that she’s on a shh [slurring] space station or never thinks about the fact that her best friend is an alien because it’s just her best friend, right? That’s an extreme. It can work, but that’s an extreme. Ultimately you have to ask yourself “what information does the reader need to know in order to enjoy the story?” They don’t need all the information at once, but they do need it at some point, and what is the most unobtrusive way of threading that into this world? A lot of times I will overdo it in my first draft.
E: ...nah, too easy.
TT: Overdo it on unnecessary details that add nothing, and underdo it on necessary details that actually make the story make sense. Also, I bet Paolini would HATE the work of Robin Hobb, or China Meiville for that matter.
E: Not that he’s above harassing Ms Hobb at conventions. He did claim to be a fan of hers, but for SOME strange reason I’m disinclined to trust him about what he has and has not read. Also as a side note China Meiville has written some fucking awesome books. I personally cannot recommend Perdido Street Station enough.
P: I’ll throw in just a little too much, just so it’s there. Then I can go back when I re-read the manuscript and decide what’s really necessary.
E: He re-reads his manuscripts? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
TT: Implying he edits details OUT? Haha, it is to laugh. Paolini “edits” a story and somehow makes it 30% longer.
A: *horrified sarcastic laughter*
P: Usually I trim it back.
A: *sarcastic laughter intensifies*
P: Not always, though, for the second draft of the science fiction book I had editors coming back saying “you didn’t provide enough information, could you please flesh out X,Y and Z?”
A: I won’t say that’s impossible, but I bet he ignored it when they also said “you spent too much time on this, can you please cut A, B, and C?”
E: You could try inserting some goddamn originality while you were at it, but I think we all know that’s off the table.
P: And that’s because I over-compensated after writing the fantasy. But you really need to avoid infodumping because it’s the fastest way to lose the audience’s attention - I often will just put a book down if the author is basically lecturing me on how the world works.
E: I will often put a book down if it has your name on the cover. And by put down I mean hurl it at the nearest wall.
TT: Huge chunks of the Space Brick are Paolini lecturing the readers about how the world works.
E: Or doesn’t work. I still don’t know why “ship brains” are considered a remotely good idea.
P: I mean as long as things make sense to your characters and, and, you’re able to either convey through context what specifically needs to be conveyed, you’re probably good.
E: Failing that just tack on some long, boring appendices nobody asked for.
M: Yeah… well, how do you kind of create a unique voice in your writing?
E: He doesn’t. In that or any other sense of the word “unique”. Hey, did you know that in computing “c+p” stands for “copy and paste”? How appropriate.
M: And avoid making your story style seem bland?
E: Kid, you’re talking to the king of Bland.
TT: The emperor of bland. The very living avatar of blandness. Paolini is the Weeties of writing. So bland it actively makes the reader less interesting for having read it. So bland that John Kellogg would recommend it to prevent indigestion.
E: And of course suppress those wicked ungodly sexual urges. (No, really. Look it up).
TT: I wasn’t going to go there, but yes, Brisingr can be used to prevent masturbation.
E: Because thinking about the sheer boredom involved is one of the easiest ways to induce what’s colloquially known as a hard-off?
A: That and the fact that the way Paolini handles anything related to sex is just that unappealing.
E: Oh yeah. I might be a sex repulsed asexual but a well-written bit of eroticism can still get me a bit turned on. But when Paolini tries it… shudder.
TT: You just can't handle Roran's rippling muscles and Orik's muddy balls.
M: Because you’ve got this story and you’ve built your world and avoided infodumping and you’re on your way to create this story - how d’you kind of make it… yours?
E: I love to imagine that this was said with an undercurrent of sarcasm, though sadly it wasn’t.
P: I am so glad you asked! Because this was something I struggled with when I was starting!
E: Noooo, really? I couldn’t tell, Mr “Somewhere Between Tolkien At His Best and Seamus Heaney’s Translation of Beowulf”. And yes, as far as I’m concerned that remark will continue coming back to haunt you.
TT: it still isn’t his, it’s an abominable Frankenstein of other people’s ideas that he’s stitched together.
E: Every moment I live while transcribing this is agony! (I’m only half kidding. By the time I was done with this latest eleven minutes I had an honest to gods headache).
P: All these authors talking their authorial voice, right?
E: Yeah, and what authorial voice you have is an incredibly ugly one. More on this later.
P: And you go “where do you get that?! Where does this voice come from?” Right? It was very puzzling to me when I was a teenager. So there are a couple of answers to this. One is you could look at another author’s style, who you really admire…
E: And then make a truly terrible attempt at trying to imitate them.
A: I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: Paolini really fucked himself over by trying to be Tolkien. Yes, trying to imitate the style of someone you admire can help you discover your own authorial voice, but only if you think critically about what you’re writing and whether it’s actually working. If the style of your idols does not come naturally to you, don’t force yourself to stick with it, because in doing so you’ll be stifling your own voice.
P: Whether it’s an historical style or something that’s unique to this one person.
E: I kind of love how he keeps using that word.
A: Oh, yes, he definitely hates the word “unique” so very much.
P: And you could just copy it. You can say “I’m going to write in this style as best as I can” and you can just copy it. The downside of that is…
E: *gestures at his attempts to mimic Tolkein and shudders*
TT: … at least when writers do this as writing practice to develop their voice, THEY DON’T PUBLISH THE FIRST THING THEY VOMIT UP
P: …because it’s not your natural writing style, you may not do a very good job of it.
E: Noooo, ya think?
P: At least compared with the original writer.
E: Exhibits A through F: everything this dickhead ever published.
P: But you can learn a lot from attempting to emulate another person’s style.
E: Clearly in your case it didn’t work.
TT: Again, this is a good idea FOR PRACTICING. You don’t then try to publish your first attempt and call it a day.
A: Exactly! You try on styles to see what fits, and if it doesn’t, you stop trying to do that and try to find something that actually suits you!
P: That’s one approach - you can look at Dickens or Jane Austen or Tolkien and say “okay I’m gonna write like this!”
E: Is it just me or has he started repeating himself more and more frequently as this thing drags on?
TT: He’s either in love with the sound of his own smugness, or he’s started to take speechwriting lessons from Donald Trump.
E: I write the best books - I mean they’re just beautiful, they’re the biggest books, no-one has better books than me! (Oh come on, that joke will never get old).
P: The other [long pause] answer, and I think this is the better answer, is that your voice comes from who you are.
E: No fucking shit.
A: Says the guy who tried so very very hard to be Tolkien.
E: Quite frankly I don’t think he has enough self-awareness to know who he is anyway.
P: The very fact that you are writing this story makes it unique.
E: You liar.
P: There is only one you in the universe, so far as we know. So don’t try to be someone else - be the best version of you that exists!
A: I’ll take “platitudes everyone knows” for $500.
E: Yeah, what cheesy self-help book did he get this from anyway?
P: Now there are going to be some similarities between you and every other human on this planet, maybe some specific humans, but that’s okay! There will also be differences based off of who you are! And by solving the same writing problems over and over and over again over the course of an entire book and years and years of work - problems such as “how do I get my characters out of a room” and “how do I pace this scene”, “how do I describe things”, how how how how?? by solving those problems over and over and over again you will develop a shorthand. You will know how you want to say things because you’ve done it ten thousand times! And in fact what ends up happening is you get impatient. You’re like “I’ve done this so many times! What is the fastest way to achieve this and have it still make sense?” And how you choose to do this is how you find your voice. How you solve those problems is your voice. And you will do things in idiosyncratic ways. You will do it in ways that would seem like mistakes if someone else did it, which become central parts of your voice. You can look at Stephen King or J.K.Rowling, and the way they solve problems is different from each other. And maybe it would be a mistake if they did it the same way as the other person, but it’s unique to them.
E: YOU MADE YOUR POINT A HUGE GODDAMN PARAGRAPH AGO. And stop saying “unique”.
TT: I don’t like to include the same gif twice in one post, but this calls for a repeat of that clip from The Simpsons of the kid crying “he’s already dead!”
E: You could always spring for a flogging the dead horse gif instead.
P: It gives it that flavour that you don’t find anywhere else.
E: And now “later” has finally come, and it’s time for one of my patented obnoxious Epistler Lectures.
*takes a deep breath*
Despite my cynicism I would actually argue that Paolini has found his own authorial voice.
It’s just not a good one. It’s pompous, it’s whiny, it’s smug and condescending, and it’s often incredibly ugly and mean-spirited, not to mention racist and misogynistic. That being so I would say he rather shot himself in the foot when he (correctly) stated that your authorial voice comes from who you are.
And who and what is he? A smug, sheltered, spoiled brat celebrity with an extremely low level of maturity who thinks the world owes him a living.
So it’s not really all that surprising if you think about it.
TT: Don’t worry folks, only… HOW long left?!
E: 
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For the record, these are some of the morals that are present in his work:
- It's perfectly acceptable to treat people you kill like RPG kills and you don't have to feel the least bit guilty about it.
- Genocide is not at all bad (re. the Ra'zac, Urgals and Nasuada's labour camps)
- Your parentage decides your moral worth (re. Murtagh).
- Being a SPECIAL makes everything you do GOOD, and if you doubt a special, you're automatically EVIL. (re. Elva, Murtagh, Thorn, Galbatorix, Shruikan, Orrin)
- You must be grateful for anything a SPECIAL does to you, else you are EVIL, and worthy of punishment or even death. (re. all the Empire soldiers, for example).
- Making non-humanoid animals suffer or killing them, for no good reason, is perfectly acceptable. (re. this:
,
Arya and the gyrfalcon, and Blagden, who is almost the personification of this.
- Rape isn't all that bad and sometimes even good. (re. Saphira fucking Fírnen even though he backed away and gave no indication of knowing what was going on).
And that's not everything, not by a long shot.
So yeah, his authorial voice is horrible.
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As Epistler has said, especially noticeable in To Sleep, Paolini's authorial voice is mean-spirited, cynical, and somewhat sadistic.
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And often, things do make more sense by explaining them using those one-off plot elements (the Fanghur and the ninja dwarves, for example.)
Yes, like portraying genocide as "no big deal", which has caused millions of deaths in the past. This is what I mean by "vile themes".
Yeah, the ~~greater good~~ of putting a sociopathic, completely incompetent eighteen-year-old girl on the throne, who's already got a genocide on her name.
And there's lots of hints that's she's there to let someone far worse take over.
But they are consistent with the mindset of an 800-year-old dragon, who used to be leader of an insanely powerful order, and who, in his time, condoned slavery, rape, mind-rape and who knows what more. *wink wink nudge nudge*
And when you put that stuff together, there's a completely different story behind it. Woot! Two stories for the price of one.
Yeah right. I've spent months weaving your story together for you and the end result is nothing like you would think, Paolini.
Mister "Burning babies alive is a very good thing to do!"
Because they're all utter idiots?
Because someone doesn't want to pay attention to it and refuses to tell a better story?
Such as people straight-up teleporting during their travel and no one noticing. Eragon, Chapter 44, "The Ramr River", anyone?
I'd explain the pregnancy as Elain's baby being swapped out for an Icarii kid named MalachiteCrest mid-pregnancy, because I can. Suck it.
That would explain quite everything in the whole series, by the way.
Some of the worst people to have ever walked on the face of the earth?
It's scuuuurrrrumptious humans.
Ah right, because you can only be atheist because you're too cynical. As an atheist, let me tell you, Paolini, that that's utter horseshit. Fuck off.
Which is somewhat what happened to Murtagh, as he never left Galby's court until he was eighteen...
Or as long as it isn't a question like "Hey Chris, your books seem to have an unhealthy attitude towards genocide. Did you notice?"
Indeed. And isolating someone completely from the outside world also makes them easier to influence, for example by Umaroth.
The thing that makes the most sense is that the Riders are some kind of national trauma, and everyone wants to forget about them as soon as possible and continue on with their new lives.
Yeah, that shows, what with all the ink wasted on describing flowers, or hand-holding just for the sake of hand-holding, like here:
Or Grimrr's beautiful eyelashes.
And I don't want to find it anywhere else.
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*rubs hands together*
That would explain quite everything in the whole series, by the way.
Ah, yes, the good old "fever dream" explanation. Solves basically all inconsistencies, because fever dreams make no sense at all!
Ah right, because you can only be atheist because you're too cynical. As an atheist, let me tell you, Paolini, that that's utter horseshit. Fuck off.
Judging by Eldest, he's an atheist himself, so he should definitely know better.
Or Grimrr's beautiful eyelashes.
Or, of course, the classic: Oromis's hairless groin.
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You'll see...
It's especially appropriate because of all those times the main characters tell us everything feels like a dream, such as at Roran's wedding. So, who knows?
He's such a creep. What competent teacher gets naked in front of their students? I also think Glaedr is quite creepy, what with calling Eragon and Saphira "my hatchlings", as if he's their father or something.
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Which is more world building than his entire space brick has. It took about 5 minutes with a calculator. It’s not hard. Heck. Let’s call that organization, I don’t know, Star Explorinators, we could follow the path of Random Namegenerator… I want to use this one: https://www.namegeneratorfun.com/toughguy I got Bold Fistcrunch. Great. So Ms. Fistcrunch gets into the program at 18. She’s then selected to be the captain of the Random ship name… You guessed it: Sizzle Hardcheese. She’ll be the 4th captain of that ship on the Lalande 21185 route. After 5 years of training the now 27 year old is in command of her one and only command mission. Leaving home with the 20 odd people that will be stuck together for the next 20 years. They’ll see home again in their late 40s, maybe even early 50s if things get delayed. Then have to train the next group. Only to watch from the sidelines approaching retirement if not already retired when their ship launches again. That’d be a thing.
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See, that makes a lot of sense. I love the theme of passing the torch and training the next generation, too, and then watching from the sidelines as they go off on their own grand adventure. Shades of Bilbo talking about travelling again: "I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains!"
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I’m glad that he can at least parrot it during an interview. Maddie wouldn’t know how the extent of his success in applying it, though the the differences and pitfalls between understanding and application would be an excellent discussion for this podcast. The host and listeners are at the same level of interest as he was when he wrote Eragon, and Maddie is passionate enough to organize at least this interview if not the podcast itself. He opens up about some of his struggles, but I think he’s answering many questions as though they were asked by fans, and not fellow practicing writers.
P: There’s always the temptation to gloss over the things that are difficult or get in the way of the story you want to tell.
A: As I said earlier: he asks himself questions, he just asks the wrong ones. And then he puts the answers in, completely failing to realize that they’re completely irrelevant to what he’s actually trying to accomplish.
P: And a lot of the time those are things other creators, other writers, gloss over. But my experience has been that if you delve into those things you’ll end up with a really unique - I hate saying unique - setting.
Retrofitting the world to adhere to a story may only result in a world that’s good for that one story. It’s a bummer when I run into something difficult and realize that fixing it means changing a ton of other stuff, even losing some things I’m fond of, but it’s always better. For me, writer’s block is the loss of clarity, and it can take a bit to ask the questions whose answers are going to restore that clarity. But it’s one of my favorite feelings when things fall into place.
P: Or with science fiction, I really dug into how faster than light travel works. Which is something a lot of authors skip over. And I ended up with something that I feel is, um… adds a lot to my story.
I only read the group spork, so all I can think of is the long sections of Kira being alone since she couldn’t go into cryo, and the trick they did to see if a certain ship had been in the area. I can see that he was trying to think of ways that people living with this tech might use it, though that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s beneficial to include in the story. It seems a little like he came across a cool concept and wanted to share it, but figuring out how to incorporate it into a story was what got in the way of the story.
A neat example is a short story by the Zero Punctuation guy, where the captain of a motley crew's spaceship evaded opponents who hadn't grown up moving in 3D like she had.
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It feels a bit ironic considering that Tolkien, one of Paolini's so-called inspirations, took his entire life to build his world... and never finished it.
As someone who is building a world based on the viceroyalty of New Spain in Mexico for his Isekai story, the truth is that Paolini could have done something... less generic with his world. He has interesting things, but everything is overshadowed by the other elements of the plot that do not amount to anything.