Quote:
Originally Posted by strawhatbrat
if the first chapter is boring?
Do I keep going and give it a chance?
What do you do if you're bored at the beginning of a book?
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I always have a feeling that, having begun I should go on. It's got hold of me now. I'm reading Ken Follett's "World Without End". His characters are paper-thin and black or white with no nuances of grey, and at every stage you get the feeling that he's reading the manual from "Writing a Novel 101" and you just know that there will be at least one if not two dei ex machina to either sink his hero deeper in the mire, or suddenly save a hopeless situation. This worked okay in his earlier, war books, but is doomed in what is intended to be a literary work like this one. Funnily enough I don't remember this problem, at least not to the same extent, with the earlier book in this series, although, thinking back, I realise it was there.
The trouble is his research appears to be good, and the descriptions of 14th century England, in between the thin, thin story line, are good enough to make one keep going despite the sighs of "here we go again" every time he gets back to the "plot".