I’m still working my way through “The Wise Man’s Fear”, by Patrick Rothfuss, and probably will be for some time. I’m listening to it as an audiobook, and it’s a long one. And while audio isn’t always the best format for a writer to learn from another writer’s technique, I’m noticing a few things here that I’m finding interesting.
Rothfuss likes to layer. His “Kingkiller Chronicles” series is really an elaborate layering of stories, all with the same character. There is, of course, the frame story of Kote (if I misspell names, forgive me. You don’t get to see spellings in audio books) the innkeeper explaining how he became an innkeeper when he used to hold the world in the palm of his hand. And then there’s the main story of Kvothe, a coming-of-age/bildungsroman tale of a gypsy boy whose family are destroyed by supernatural beings.
But from here we start to see the layering of plotlines, which gets quite deep (in more ways than one). For example, we have:
- Kvothe’s self-appointed quest to avenge his family
- Kvothe’s ongoing relationship with Denna
- Kvothe’s efforts to learn everything he can at the University
- Kvothe’s ongoing problems with money
- Kvothe’s ongoing war with Ambrose
- Kvothe’s efforts to become a Namer
Those are just the “meta” plotlines. At any given time there are numerous sub-stories going on within each of those larger plotlines. Currently in the book for example (Possible Spoiler Alert):
- Kvothe’s effort to steal Denna’s ring back from Ambrose leaves him with tell-tale injuries and provides Ambrose with blood, which he uses to attack Kvothe with Sympathy.
- Kvothe’s friends have to stay up at night to guard him from attack while Kvothe sleeps
- Kvothe is trying to find a way to ‘artifice’ a gram (sp?) to protect himself against attacks, but that knowledge is forbidden
- His efforts to determine who is attacking him results in misunderstanding and making a powerful enemy of his loanshark
- Master Elodin seems to be teaching everything except Naming.
- His weariness from all of the above is hampering his studies and he is starting to lose Sympathy duels.
- His lute is stolen
- He’s spending money like no tomorrow
- Two of his friends are starting to fall in love
- His artificing instructor his challenging him to make something challenging
- Some strange young woman that keeps showing up looking for him
All of the second list are, in some small way, advancing the main plotlines in the first list, while at the same time the plotlines higher up on the second list are also driving those lower down. The result is like a large river. There is a fair amount of activity right near the surface, yet those are indicative of and resulting from the relatively slow, deep water beneath the surface. And all of it is one massive stream of water moving slowly and inevitably toward the sea.
The result is a complex story with enormous depth that you know is moving toward…something. The reader is but a stick being swept along on the surface. Then there are the many scenes and characters that, for the moment at least, appear more to be set-dressing than plot, but weave in and out of the story:
- Kvothe’s friendship with Auri
- Kvothe’s interactions with Count Threpe
- The world of the Aeolian
- His rivalry with Master Hamm
- His relationship with Anker the innkeeper
- Denna’s mysterious patron
I’ve not even begun to look at the various sub-plots and characters of the frame story, either.
To keep all of these balls in the air is no small feat. Rothfuss is, without a doubt, an excellent writer. Perhaps more accurately, he’s an excellet illusionist. He’s very good at creating the appearance of a busy, moving story. And yet the story barely moves. Even with the frame story returning to focus here and there to remind us of the destination point we are working toward, I often find myself wonder if we’re really getting anywhere. The frame story hints at so many things yet to come, and yet we often seem no closer to any of it than we were before. All we know for sure about the period in time the book is currently working through is that he will be expelled from the University. (Not a spoiler–we get this information almost before we even know there’s a story)
Now granted, these are long books. The first book covered a lot of ground before arriving at the University, and some of my perusing indicates there will be plenty of things happening beyond the University in this book. But at the moment it’s fortunate the day-to-day activities of Kvothe’s life are interesting or we would be bored by this ponderously slow pace. At least I would. I’m from the Rocky Mountains. Our rivers move fast around here.
I think that alone is the one thing keeping me from declaring Rothfuss’ work to be incredible. The immersion is perhaps too deep, the pace too ponderous. There is too much weight and not enough actual motion. Such may be the danger of writing a tightly-focused first-person epic. I’m not trying to suggest that his setting isn’t interesting, his characters compelling, his scenes entertaining. And for all I know at present, this may all be very important detail that needs to be laid out before he can pick up the pace. But this story is supposedly being dictated to a historian over the space of (so far) twelve to eighteen hours. On audio it’s taken at least forty. I have no idea how long Rothfuss plans this series to be (it’s at least hinted at taking three days to dictate), but while we’re in day two, it feels like, if this were Star Wars, Luke hasn’t even found Princess Leia’s message yet.
But my original intent here was to praise Caeser, not to bury him. I do believe that Rothfuss’ layering approach has a great deal of merit. His ability to maintain and advance all these different layers is admirable and worthy of emulation. I don’t know if this is something he manages all in a single pass or something that he builds in over several revisions, but either way, it does provide a great deal of complexity to the story, especially when he can get plotlines to intersect one another. It’s an interesting approach, and intend to keep this all in mind and start practicing it myself.