Bizzaro Book Review: Reamde by Neal Stephenson

I struggled for quite some time trying to figure out how to start this review. And I do mean struggled. There were unicorns involved. You don’t want to know.

The problem I face is that while some books are door stoppers, Reamde is closer to being an actual door, and there is much to both love and hate in its vast pantheon of pages. So for the sake of simplicity I’m going to start with the beginning. Not the opening scene, mind you, I’m talking about the first thing you’ll see when you lay eyes on this book. The cover.

Now do my eyes deceive me or does that word there were the title should be say Reamde? It does? So would it then be a safe assumption to believe that something called Reamde is going to be central to the plot of the book? Yes, I thought so too.

But. It. Isn’t. (Due to the sad limitations of typography you’re going to have to imagine me saying this through clenched teeth.)

Reamde, a computer virus designed to infect a World of Warcraft-style game call T’rain is a complete MacGuffin. It’s like a flint that lights the story’s fire, but does not ever actually become part of that fire.

Now normally I wouldn’t mind this so much. But in a sense Reamde is for me an emblem of the biggest problem with the whole book.

See, Neal Stephenson has a niche of sorts. He’s a writer for geeks. There is nothing at all wrong with this. But because he has begun his career as a keeper of the keys to literary nerdvana I imagine he feels some pressure to continue playing to that audience as much as he can. Which is the only reason I can fathom for his insistence on including large portions of his book to detailing the workings and operations of a computer game that has nothing to do with the actual story.

And I’m not talking about a few throwaway references here and there. I’m talking  about nearly a third of a thousand-plus-page book being devoted to something that never advances the story one iota. And the frustrating thing is that because of the bulk of time given to the T’rain/Reamde plotline, it feels like its going to matter. It feels important.

I was ready for it to be important. My writing brain was doing all kinds of geeking out wondering how Neal Stephenson was going to tie all this together at the end. And then he didn’t. Instead after hundreds of pages devoted to T’rain, the whole thread finally peters out with one of the characters actually saying, “Well, that was a colossal waste of time.”

Which is a shame, because if you push aside all that nonsense about digital terrain creation and using gaming for airport security there is a really good book in there. It’s got gangsters and hackers and terrorists; it’s got spies and Russian security consultants and gun nuts so far right-wing that the Tea Party wouldn’t know what to do with them. It’s got twists like you wouldn’t believe, cliff hangers that will leave you gasping for breath, and and the coolest bad guy this side of Darth Vader.

In short, this is a fat book with a skinny book inside trying to get out. If you haven’t read it yet, you should. Just take my advice and skip over anything at all related to T’rain; it’s nothing more than a long and treacherous path that leads to a dead end in a valley without a view.

Building on the Bones, or: Why Structure Doesn’t Have to be Boring

[The following post contains references to STORY STRUCTURE. This concept is known to the State of California to cause people’s heads to explode. But who cares what California thinks anyway? Hippies.]

You know what’s fun? Watching movies after you’ve learned about three-act struture. Specifically the bit about the first plot point appearing at exactly twenty-five percent of the running time. It’s like magic. Try it sometime. Look up the total running time of the movie, divide by four, then sit back and wait for the midden to hit the windmill. It never fails.

You’ll be able to amaze your friends and family. Pretty soon they’ll be so amazed by your seemingly-psychic ability to predict the path of the movie they’ll have stopped watching movies with you entirely. Those brave enough to stick it out will remark in wonder, “Are you going to do this for every movie we watch?”

Okay, so maybe this isn’t the best way to endear yourself to your friends. But understanding structure is vitally important to composing long-form fiction of any kind.

However structure can be a bit of a brier patch when you’re first wading into it. For instance you might be tempted to say to yourself, “The first twenty-five percent of the book is spent on this boring ‘getting to know you’ crap? What kind of snooze-fest do you want me to write?”

Well, today I thought I’d share an example from a book I’ve been reading recently that follows the formula of structure to perfection and yet showcases the amazing amount of latitude afforded us writers within the confines of what structure dictates.

The book in question is Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. If you have even passed by this book in the store or at the library chances are you had to fight just to escape the gravitational pull generated by the sheer mass of the thing. Weighing in at over a thousand pages it’s easily the longest book I’ve read since the time I decided that Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations might make for an entertaining afternoon browse.

If you’re like me at this point you’re wondering, how in the heck is anyone going to spend two hundred and fifty pages just on setup? Surely when you’re writing a book this long you can skip ahead to the good stuff right?

And for a while it seems like that’s exactly what Stephenson has done. By somewhere around page one hundred we already have a bona fide bad guy on the scene and our heroes are off on a high stakes adventure. But then, just as you’re settling into the flow of the story, at almost exactly the two-hundred-and-fifty page mark everything is turned on its head. The placeholder bad-guy is unceremoniously killed off and the real Big Boss Troublemaker enters the narrative.

Right. On. Schedule.

It is only then that we learn that all the stuff with the hackers, the Russian Mafia, the ex-military security consultants, all of it was 100% pure unfiltered setup for the “real” conflict. And it wasn’t boring.

The takeaway here is that just because structure dictates that the first quarter of the book should be dedicated to setting up the story, that doesn’t mean that it has to be a total snooze-fest. It can and should have conflict. It can even have bad guys. You’re just not allowed to introduce the bad guy until that magical twenty-five percent mark.

There’s lots more I could say here, but the  main point I’m trying to make is that the three act structure is more flexible than it appears at first glance. I understand why writers balk at the concept of being “constrained” by structure, but for me learning these principles has been a altogether liberating experience. And whether I’m watching a movie or reading a book, it’s always fascinating to see how so many stories work within these basic principles.

With InBoCoLuCy (International Book Composing Lunar Cycle) just around the corner I think my fellow authors would be well served to have the fundamentals of structure at least knocking around somewhere in the back of our heads as we wade into the sea of words.

Don’t let structure tie you down. Let it set you free.