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shivverThis post is probably going to come off sounding really arrogant, so I'm warning you before you have a chance to click the cut. And if you read it and think that I'm totally off-base here, please let me know. I'd really like to hear why my opinion is wrong/not fair/conceited.
My husband's in love with this LitRPG series of novels called Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman. (In case you don't know what LitRPG is, it's a sub-genre of fantasy in which the characters are like game characters, with stats and skills and leveling mechanics, and they know their stats and skills.) He really loves it and wants to be able to talk about it with me, so he's convinced me to read them. I've just started reading book four, out of I think eight so far published.
I'm not going to lie: the novels are fantastic. The world-building and the story are complex and deep, and the characters are well-drawn. The plots of the individual novels are compelling, and the adventures are amazing. I'm definitely enjoying reading them. You know me, I don't usually read, so if I'm bothering to continue reading a series, it must be good.
Thing is, the actual writing isn't great. The author's grasp of grammar is average, and his style is oddly jerky. I find that I often re-read paragraphs and rewrite them in my mind, to fix grammar problems or to make it flow better. It's definitely impacting my enjoyment of the story.
I discussed this with my husband. Well, to be honest, there was no discussion: I said what I thought, that the books are fantastic but the writing isn't great, and he blew up. He was angry that I had anything bad to say about the books, and that was quite an argument. (The sentence "You're not a real writer, so you don't have any right to criticize" came into it.) I've since decided to never say anything bad about the books to him, which is of course why I'm talking about them here. ;)
Because I do wonder if I'm being too critical. But I do think that there's a big difference between storytelling and writing: a person may be compose a story and build a world populated with vibrant characters, but that doesn't guarantee that they can write it in good English and in a entertaining manner.
Here are a few examples of the things in Dinniman's writing that bugs me. You can tell me if I'm off-base.
The one grammatical thing that he does that bugs me the most is using prepositions in place of adverbs, especially in the case of "before" and "after". I don't have an actual example with me, but here's something he commonly does.
Before, she'd told him that the dog had died.
The word "before" is a preposition and thus is expected to modify something, in this case, whatever it was that happened after she told him about the dog, such as "Before he had the chance to ask" or "Before the concert". If the action happened at an unspecified earlier time, then you should use an adverb such as "Earlier" or "Previously". Using "before" by itself, without a following word/phrase that it modifies, is grammatically incorrect.
Part of my loathing of this particular grammar error comes from an incident in fifth grade, when I'd written a sentence like this in an essay and my mother called me on it, explaining why it was wrong and why I shouldn't use "before" like that. Thus, when I read it in others' writing, I do get a little triggered -- I knew this was wrong back in fifth grade, so why is this published author getting it wrong?
But another part is that it has actually mattered in the story. More than once, he's used this construction, "Before,", and what it was before actually mattered. I actually needed to know when the event had happened, and I had to reread the paragraph and the ones around it to try to puzzle out when it was. This is not fun.
There are other grammatical mistakes that he makes, but most of them are nitpicky and not really worth discussing, such as misplaced hyphens. No, there shouldn't be a hyphen in "a stocky man, about 45-years old" (actual example). :P
Style, on the other hand...
Dinniman's style is dry and inelegant. Part of it is that a good part of the story is about the monsters, traps, and puzzles in the dungeon and how Carl (the main character) and his friends defeat them, which requires a lot of description of physical objects and mechanical processes, and that's actually difficult to do with both precision and flow. This, however, is not what I'm concerned with. It's that his prose is often awkward and stilted.
Here are a couple of examples.
Quiet music wafted through the large, L-shaped room. I saw it was a young, teenaged changeling playing a stringed instrument that was like a square-shaped guitar. The music was subtle, but haunting. It had kind of an Asian vibe. It was completely out-of-place for such a dive.
When I read "I saw it was a young, teenaged changeling..." I stopped and looked back at the previous paragraph to figure out what he was referring to, because he'd been describing a room and then suddenly now was describing a person that I apparently had missed. It took me a bit to realize that he was describing the musician, not someone else that had been mentioned earlier.
The rest of the paragraph isn't much better: the redundant adjectives of "young" and "teenaged", the unnecessary mention that the square-shaped guitar was a string instrument, and the description of the music broken up among three passive sentences.
In this next one, Carl and his friends have just teleported to this spot, ten feet away from a humanoid camel who's watching a building burning down after an attack and a number of explosions, so understand that they have appeared out of nowhere and the situation is rather tense.
A female camel standing about ten feet away looked in our direction and startled at our sudden appearance.
“Oh my, what happened?” Donut asked, sounding innocent.
The camel paused uncertainly. Her eyes focused on Firas who was being held up by Louis. I pulled an empty bottle of whiskey from my inventory and pretended to drink in an attempt to look like we’d just wandered over here from a nearby bar. She seemed to relax. She blinked twice and said, “(what she said isn't important here)"
There's just so much here I could comment on, but I think the main problem is, where's the tension? The town's just been attacked, there were explosions going off, the building's burning down, and these people just suddenly appeared out of nowhere in front of her, and the camel is only uncertain?
It doesn't help that Dinniman's style is largely passive. Carl's telling the story in first-person, so there's a lot of him telling us what he experienced instead of telling us what happened. For example, passages like this
Behind us.... I heard shouting. More dromedarians were coming into the building..."
are common, instead of something like "Behind us, dromedarians poured into the building, shouting at us to stop."
Taken all together, I spend a lot of my reading time piecing things together that I think should be a lot clearer and rewriting awkward paragraphs in my head. It's making me read even slower than I usually do (I am a slow reader) and sometimes even killing my enjoyment of the story altogether. I've started reading the fourth book and it's been difficult to keep at it, even though I'm sure that once I get to the main part of the story, it'll be fun.
I think that the quality of the story and the world is strong enough that most people don't notice the shortcomings in the writing. Also, the first six or so books were posted on Royal Road without beta (and I also think without much self-editing, as there are lots of typos and errors that would have been caught with even shallow editing, such as duplicate descriptions a few paragraphs apart that were probably a result of writing them in two different sittings and forgetting that it had been described earlier). Dinniman is now publishing through a traditional publisher, so maybe things will improve with an independent editor.
My husband's in love with this LitRPG series of novels called Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman. (In case you don't know what LitRPG is, it's a sub-genre of fantasy in which the characters are like game characters, with stats and skills and leveling mechanics, and they know their stats and skills.) He really loves it and wants to be able to talk about it with me, so he's convinced me to read them. I've just started reading book four, out of I think eight so far published.
I'm not going to lie: the novels are fantastic. The world-building and the story are complex and deep, and the characters are well-drawn. The plots of the individual novels are compelling, and the adventures are amazing. I'm definitely enjoying reading them. You know me, I don't usually read, so if I'm bothering to continue reading a series, it must be good.
Thing is, the actual writing isn't great. The author's grasp of grammar is average, and his style is oddly jerky. I find that I often re-read paragraphs and rewrite them in my mind, to fix grammar problems or to make it flow better. It's definitely impacting my enjoyment of the story.
I discussed this with my husband. Well, to be honest, there was no discussion: I said what I thought, that the books are fantastic but the writing isn't great, and he blew up. He was angry that I had anything bad to say about the books, and that was quite an argument. (The sentence "You're not a real writer, so you don't have any right to criticize" came into it.) I've since decided to never say anything bad about the books to him, which is of course why I'm talking about them here. ;)
Because I do wonder if I'm being too critical. But I do think that there's a big difference between storytelling and writing: a person may be compose a story and build a world populated with vibrant characters, but that doesn't guarantee that they can write it in good English and in a entertaining manner.
Here are a few examples of the things in Dinniman's writing that bugs me. You can tell me if I'm off-base.
The one grammatical thing that he does that bugs me the most is using prepositions in place of adverbs, especially in the case of "before" and "after". I don't have an actual example with me, but here's something he commonly does.
Before, she'd told him that the dog had died.
The word "before" is a preposition and thus is expected to modify something, in this case, whatever it was that happened after she told him about the dog, such as "Before he had the chance to ask" or "Before the concert". If the action happened at an unspecified earlier time, then you should use an adverb such as "Earlier" or "Previously". Using "before" by itself, without a following word/phrase that it modifies, is grammatically incorrect.
Part of my loathing of this particular grammar error comes from an incident in fifth grade, when I'd written a sentence like this in an essay and my mother called me on it, explaining why it was wrong and why I shouldn't use "before" like that. Thus, when I read it in others' writing, I do get a little triggered -- I knew this was wrong back in fifth grade, so why is this published author getting it wrong?
But another part is that it has actually mattered in the story. More than once, he's used this construction, "Before,
There are other grammatical mistakes that he makes, but most of them are nitpicky and not really worth discussing, such as misplaced hyphens. No, there shouldn't be a hyphen in "a stocky man, about 45-years old" (actual example). :P
Style, on the other hand...
Dinniman's style is dry and inelegant. Part of it is that a good part of the story is about the monsters, traps, and puzzles in the dungeon and how Carl (the main character) and his friends defeat them, which requires a lot of description of physical objects and mechanical processes, and that's actually difficult to do with both precision and flow. This, however, is not what I'm concerned with. It's that his prose is often awkward and stilted.
Here are a couple of examples.
Quiet music wafted through the large, L-shaped room. I saw it was a young, teenaged changeling playing a stringed instrument that was like a square-shaped guitar. The music was subtle, but haunting. It had kind of an Asian vibe. It was completely out-of-place for such a dive.
When I read "I saw it was a young, teenaged changeling..." I stopped and looked back at the previous paragraph to figure out what he was referring to, because he'd been describing a room and then suddenly now was describing a person that I apparently had missed. It took me a bit to realize that he was describing the musician, not someone else that had been mentioned earlier.
The rest of the paragraph isn't much better: the redundant adjectives of "young" and "teenaged", the unnecessary mention that the square-shaped guitar was a string instrument, and the description of the music broken up among three passive sentences.
In this next one, Carl and his friends have just teleported to this spot, ten feet away from a humanoid camel who's watching a building burning down after an attack and a number of explosions, so understand that they have appeared out of nowhere and the situation is rather tense.
A female camel standing about ten feet away looked in our direction and startled at our sudden appearance.
“Oh my, what happened?” Donut asked, sounding innocent.
The camel paused uncertainly. Her eyes focused on Firas who was being held up by Louis. I pulled an empty bottle of whiskey from my inventory and pretended to drink in an attempt to look like we’d just wandered over here from a nearby bar. She seemed to relax. She blinked twice and said, “(what she said isn't important here)"
There's just so much here I could comment on, but I think the main problem is, where's the tension? The town's just been attacked, there were explosions going off, the building's burning down, and these people just suddenly appeared out of nowhere in front of her, and the camel is only uncertain?
It doesn't help that Dinniman's style is largely passive. Carl's telling the story in first-person, so there's a lot of him telling us what he experienced instead of telling us what happened. For example, passages like this
Behind us.... I heard shouting. More dromedarians were coming into the building..."
are common, instead of something like "Behind us, dromedarians poured into the building, shouting at us to stop."
Taken all together, I spend a lot of my reading time piecing things together that I think should be a lot clearer and rewriting awkward paragraphs in my head. It's making me read even slower than I usually do (I am a slow reader) and sometimes even killing my enjoyment of the story altogether. I've started reading the fourth book and it's been difficult to keep at it, even though I'm sure that once I get to the main part of the story, it'll be fun.
I think that the quality of the story and the world is strong enough that most people don't notice the shortcomings in the writing. Also, the first six or so books were posted on Royal Road without beta (and I also think without much self-editing, as there are lots of typos and errors that would have been caught with even shallow editing, such as duplicate descriptions a few paragraphs apart that were probably a result of writing them in two different sittings and forgetting that it had been described earlier). Dinniman is now publishing through a traditional publisher, so maybe things will improve with an independent editor.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-22 11:02 pm (UTC)Sorry your spouse can't separate writing from the writer. Even the best writer ends up with some odd sentences they couldn't get perfect and just cut their loses on, lol.
(That "Before" thing is a legit writing crime, imo. XD **Hugs** to your fifth grade self though.)