Bloat and sprawl in fantasy

What too many fantasy writers produce

Imagine a fantasy character. One popular version will be a muscular and athletic person who is wearing only enough clothing or armor to avoid an explicit content rating, but not nearly what is needed to protect against wounding. Much less common is anyone who has gone to seed — or to doughnuts, as the case may be. The times are changing, and dwarfs always look stocky, but when readers and writers picture themselves in a magical realm, they tend to choose to improve things over the real world.

But not in the writing. The prose of the story will all too often be a sprawling dog’s breakfast of worldbuilding that qualifies as a scientific analysis, cataloguing of the contents of the environment, and internalizations to the point of mastication of the reader’s attention. Worldbuilding, description, and internalization are good things to do in reasonable measure, but when the story is bogged down by any of them, the text ceases to be a novel.

One illustration of this is Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. One example will illustrate Jordan’s obsessive attention to detail — and will show that points can be made without looking at every single item in the category to be considered. In The Eye of the World, two of the main characters, Rand and Mat, have to travel from Whitebridge to Caemlyn. Mat has acquired the One Ring, um, excuse me, a cursed dagger, and its influence…