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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1512846" data-attributes="member: 5171">Yes.So, then, in your mind, the fact that he named the entire series "The Sword of Truth" doesn't have any bearing?  I mean, if I wrote a novel called "Ice-Lances of Galspar" and then the entire novel involved people sitting around drinking tea in Galspar with the ice-lances slung over their shoulder, and occasionally people would scuffle, but the ice-lances would never come into play, I imagine that people would feel a bit misled.So, I agree with you that it's a personal criticism on my part -- I like fight scenes.  I don't need 'em all the time, thanks.  However, in a series named after a sword, where the sword is the most powerful artifact (except for the boxes) in the book, I don't think hoping for a nice sword-fight somewhere is out of line.And on an impersonal level, the few fights that were there were done badly.  I'd have to hunt down the book again to quote stuff, but it was muddy and choppy and poorly detailed.  I don't need to know every movement of every combatant (it's not good for a thirty-second fight to take five minutes to read), but a good writer knows which special details to add to give the reader enough information for their own minds to fill in the rest of the blanks.  (There's a writing exercise that involves looking at the room around you, writing down every detail you can sense about that room until you've got a list of fifteen or twenty items, and then paring it down to the two or three things that you can say that will let the reader subconsciously fill in the rest of the details on his own -- I'm by no means great at it myself, but I can recognize good versus bad.)  Goodkind was actually much better at the emotional aspects of his novel than the martial aspects -- I didn't like or find believable the emotions he raised, but at least he clearly articulated what he wanted me to think his characters were thinking.</blockquote>

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