Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

1) A good writer has the ability to keep the reader's interest even when he is writing setup. 2) A good writer masters the ability to time the execution of story-lines with appropriate pacing and a sense of the dramatic. 3) A good writer does not need to spell every little thing out for the reader. 4) A good writer knows how to keep his/her story focused. 5) A good writer possesses the knowledge that a book consists of a beginning, a middle, and an end. 6) A good writer respects his/her characters as individuals and recognize their unique abilities to develope in different directions. Let's take a look at Jordan, shall we? 1) If Jordan had managed to keep his readers interested, he wouldn't be recieving 1-star reviews. Even when you are writing setup you need to keep the reader interested. Robin Hobb, for instance, does this by simply using a language so formidable that reading her words is in itself a pleasure. Jordan's words have become very bland and tasteless over the last few books, not unlike MacDonald's food. 2) As any professional writer knows, when you are dealing with two or more parallell storylines you have to maintain some sort of balance between them and time the unfolding of events so that the reader is able to follow the different threads. You can either divide the different storylines into large "blocks" like Tolkien did in The Two Towers, or you can switch back and forth between them. If you have many different storylines, you have the wonderful advantage of being able to tell only the most interesting bits from each one - kindof like GRR Martin is doing in A Song of Ice and Fire. With so many different storylines in the loop, why would we want to read about people clippnig their toenails? Honestly, one wonders if not a good writer would have been able to derive more interesting events from all these storylines than people drinking tea, going to the tailor or styling their hair? 3) Why does Jordan constantly dedicate half a page of text to every little feeling? A good writer, such as Robin Hobb for instance, only needs a few words to convey the same feeling. Why? Because she uses the groundwork she laid up in the early parts of her stories. She has introduced and developed her characters so skillfully that she after a while does not need to spend many pages describing them or their emotions. The reader knows them well enough to be able to understand their feelings without lengthy explanations. Why then does Jordan need pages and pages of laborously describing every little thing? Either he does not trust his readers to know his characters well enough, or he has simply confused lengthy descriptions with emotions. 4) I think we can all agree that Jordan's story has become unfocused. The main characters are lost like extras in a soap-opera, just hanging around the set drinking coffee and waiting for someone to remember them, though unfortunately the producers seem more interested in filming new, fresh actresses doing threesomes and getting amnesia. In essence, the story of Wheel of Time is simple: there is a bad-guy and there is a good-guy who is destined to fight him. Why then are we reading about the main guy's ex girlfriend's friend's aunts drinking tea and discussing the weather? I'm not saying you can't take small trips away from the main story, but you need to return to it and keep the main story always moving forward. And to all the fans who defends this style of writing with that this deepens his world and how it's essential to the story, I can simply say: you are wrong. And I can also say that a good writer could have spent these hundreds and hundreds of pages deepening the world and adding essential parts to the story in a more fulfilling manner, for instance by keeping focus on the main characters and having them interact with the world around them instead of staying inside their heads, gibbering to themselves. My theory is that all of Jordan's mains are locked as characters. They can't interact with the world in a normal way anymore, and so he has to resort to secondary characters to do it. Except that there is a flaw in this: when a secondary character does it, it becomes redundant. 5) A book should have a beginning, a middle and an end. A beginning to set things up (or, in the case of a sequel, bring the reader up to date), a middle to execute the plot of the book and do build-up for the ending, and an end which should contain some sort of dramatic climax to the build-up from the middle and the beginning of the book. Jordan does not seem to realise this. A book needs a plot of its own. It needs to be about something. Crossroads isn't. It is simply filler without any build-up in the beginning or any end that delivers anything to the reader. In the early books Jordan managed to keep a distinct theme for his books, the travels in the early columes, the great hunt, the chase for the sword in Tear and so on. His last installment totally lacks this. It is not a book that can even remotely be dreamed to stand on its own - as a book should to some extent, even if it's part of a series. Saying that he's doing like Tolkien and writing one long book and not a series is not a valid argument, as Tolkien wrote his entire series before he got published and there was plenty of oppertunity for both himself and for the editors to edit the book as a whole and to conside the series as a whole. Jordan can not pull this off, as his books are written one at a time. He has not means of going back and changing things in the earlier volumes that would need changing in order to convey a sense of this series being one long book rather than a series. 6) Most of Jordan's female characters seem to have developed in the exact same direction, regardless of where they started. I honestly don't think I would notice if someone switched all the "Elayne"s on a page for "Nynaeve" or whomever. They all think the exact same way, use the same words, the same rhythm of speech, and they have basically the same opinions about everything. Except that Nynaeve feels that a braid is the only acceptable hairstyle and other characters have more lofty hair-morals. In any case, this is not the mark of a good writer. A good writer is a person whom after a certain length of text can write a line of dialogue without having to specify who said it or in what tone of voice - the reader can understand anyway if the author is good enough, and given only the choice of words, the reader can feel the tone of it. Robin Hobb is a master in this regard, and she can pull it off because all her characters have distinct personalities and just like real people they have different vocabularies and different rhythms of speech. Jordan is not a good writer. His writing is well below par for writers published by serious publishing houses. If you still believe he knows what he is doing, you are either deluded, naïve or simply unable to recognize talent. A good writer would never have written this book or taken this series in this direction. I recommend you stop reading Jordan until he has finished this series completely (which would be at the earliest 2008, but that is optimistic). There are so many better writers out there! Read GRR Martin, Robin Hobb and CS Friedman instead!