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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1392666" data-attributes="member: 812">takyris is ably defending exactly the same position I hold, so all I'll say is this:Do I really need to point out the details that have been altered here? Compare the stark emotionality of "He feared for her" to the feeble "Gruntle feared that the woman to his right was underprepared for this fight." Whew! You call that sentence a model of "compression"? Please. At least it rhymes, I guess, even if it doesn't scan. Honestly, jes, you're only demonstrating how wrong you are with this.Oh wait, one other point:I take from your use of the Tolkien quote that what you are arguing is that for any particular story, there is some appropriate length at which it is best told. Your problem with Erikson being that he exceeds the appropriate length for his story.I'm not sure this idea carries very much meaning. All it does is change the terms of the argument over wordiness -- instead of saying, "Erikson's too wordy," you say, "Erikson uses more words than his story requires." Which seems like exactly the same thing, so what have we gained by adopting this notion? Of course for any story there is an optimum length -- or rather, all stories are written at some length, and we can disagree over whether that length is appropriate or not.But neither the Tolkien nor the Goldman references seem provide any ammunition at all for your suggestion that brevity is in and of itself a virtue. And if it's not in and of itself a virtue, then your concerns with Erikson's style are purely a matter of your tastes versus his. Not some fundamental truth of the story-telling art that Erikson is violating. You just don't like the way he writes.You haven't proven that he can't write well. Just that he happens to write in a manner you don't care for. You haven't suggested, for example, that his sentence structure is poor, or that his descriptive powers are feeble. You haven't offered examples of his inability to convey scenes, or characters, or of how his language is insufficient to the task of telling his story.All you are saying is that you don't like the way he writes. Which is a perfectly valid thing to say and possibly the basis of an interesting review.</blockquote>

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