(no subject)

[sideways]

I keep telling myself to give up on trying to pick up new reads from Goodreads, because it's such an unreliable experience, but then every now and then I run into something that blows me away and would not have crossed my path otherwise, and I'm back to curiously shuffling through titles in hopes of the next big winner.

Unfortunately I don't think City of Stairs is going to be it.

It's a shame, because the world-building is so much up my alley! The gods were real enough to be slaughtered in a war, and the consequences were eldritch and terrible. There is a murder that must be solved in a fraught political situation. The protagonist is a woman, and the cultures based on anything but medieval England. It should at least carry my interest through to the end...

It does not.

At least I can put my finger on the crux of what is troubling me about this one (it's annoying when I can't articulate an annoyance, because I'm forever left wondering if it's justified): it has been written for a visual medium, not a textual one. A decoy first chapter before the true protagonist enters the screen by stepping off a train; a wavering third-person omniscient narrative voice that is generous with exposition and general sights but adds little personal colour or feeling; a lead character who conveniently only really thinks about what is immediately relevant to the story, which hides her secrets nicely but leaves me with only small amounts of personality to connect to at any given time. I can picture this book as a TV show very easily, and perhaps I would like it better then, but as it is I feel little curiosity or affection for anything or anyone.

I don't know what the moral of the story is here, besides "seriously, stop just picking random titles off Goodreads because the blurb is well-spun". Probably simply that execution is more important than concept.

Comments

[sideways]

Huh! I only learned about aphantasia recently so it's interesting to hear more personal details about what it's like. It's a challenge to imagine reading words and only experiencing... well, the words! (Not in a "that sounds awful" way, just "wow that's very different".) I'm a vivid dreamer and daydreamer both, so I'm accustomed to fading so fully into mental images that I lose sight of the real world; somehow this does not make writing descriptions any easier.

Being heavily into character as a result makes sense. Rich internal worlds would surely be much more interesting than time spent waffling about scenery or fight scenes, etc. Does it impact your writing style similarly, do you think? Do you find visual mediums more compelling than textual ones as the audience?

[notasupervillain]

I have to remember to write visual descriptions. I have no interest in them, except as a way to convey information about character or world. Occasionally I get a Reader saying they want to know more about a fight scene and I have to decide if it's worth the effort. Usually I'll focus on how someone feels during a fight, to give the Reader a sense of movement without describing anything that happened.

I adore auditory mediums right now, like podcasts, but that seems to go in phases I think. I don't have any problem with visual mediums as a way to take in information. I just store it differently in my brain once it comes in. I would prefer a fight scene in a movie than in a book, but either way I'm not going to remember more than a few key moments from the fight, and with a few exceptions it's not the part of the story that I'm there for.