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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7544945" data-attributes="member: 16814">Quelle surprise.What you're failing to grasp is that what's needed to tell a story varies by story and author, so there's no baseline level of verbosity that Le Guin is refering to except being enough.  Dickens used the verbosity he needed to for his story, and not more.  This is why what Le Guin says is on the order of a truthism and not actual advice because it provides zero guidelines as to what's enough.  The only value it has is to remind that verbosity for the sake of verbosity (or terseness for the sake of terseness) is not valuable.As for Tolkien in LotR, he uses too much for a novel, but enough for his purpose, which is not really a novel but a exploration of his world on a set of narrative rails.  Tolkien is fantastic as a read on a built world, and solid on the scope of his story, but the pacing and narrative are very, very scattered amidst his exposition.  And, that's fine.  It's good to like LotR for this.  It's not good to insist that because you like it for that that it must be a good novel as well.  It's just.. not.  And lots and lots of people have bounced off it because it's not actually a good novel and that's what they were expecting.Well, I was specific about discussing LotR. The Hobbit is an interesting case -- it's actually a decent novel that was intended as a children's story.  So, Tolkien held back his exposition of his world and let the narrative take front and center so as to be appealing to children, and ended up with a good novel for adults.  People still bounce off of it as being difficult, and it's certainly a challenge for young readers to enjoy.  Not all, maybe not you, but it's not high on the kids books sales for a reason.This is pretty hopeful, but the story is not imminently comprehensible and it's certainly not approachable for most readers.  That you love it (and I did) is good, but that's mostly in spite of the presentation rather than because of it -- we read it through and gleaned something of worth.  But, as I say above, most people, even people who find love in works like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton find LotR to be impenetrable.  And, honestly, I also used to think they were great books and it required a keen appreciation of literature to grasp what so many were failing to get:  the greatness of the books!  But, after being punished by the Simarillion, and reading more widely books by other greats that actually weave a good novel, I came to realize that Tolkien had an amazing story and an amazing world setting, but just wasn't a good novelist at all.  And that's okay.  What LotR did for the genre is not definable.  It is still a seminal work, with huge impacts still felt in ever widening circles of mediums.  But, that's because the story is good and because the world of Middle-Earth are so easy to recreate from the elaborate descriptions Tolkien used, not because the books are well written novels.Of course it isn't, and I never said as much.  However, as I said, deviating requires a good touch to still produce a good novel.  Many accomplish this.  Tolkien is not among them.  He wrote a travelogue more than a novel.  And, again, that's awesome, and good, and has my eternal respect.  I can appreciate Tolkien, deeply even, and still admit LotR are poorly written novels.  They're still awesome.  I don't need them to be good novels to love them for what they are and what they mean to me.</blockquote>

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