{"id":2893,"date":"2010-09-02T18:12:20","date_gmt":"2010-09-02T22:12:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=2893"},"modified":"2010-09-02T18:28:06","modified_gmt":"2010-09-02T22:28:06","slug":"thoughts-after-finishing-in-the-realm-of-the-wolf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/thoughts-after-finishing-in-the-realm-of-the-wolf\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts after finishing In the Realm of the Wolf"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wow.\u00a0 I just finished In the Realm of the Wolf<\/em> by David Gemmell a couple hours ago, and it was AMAZING.\u00a0 So amazing, in fact, that I want to write a post examining my reaction to it before I write the review.<\/p>\n

You know that ecstatic, otherworldly feeling you get when you finish an amazingly good book?\u00a0 Where you feel like you just came home from a long, epic journey and you can’t stop thinking about it?\u00a0 Where your mind is racing with all sorts of new and beautiful ideas, as if you’ve opened your eyes for the first time?<\/p>\n

That’s how I felt after finishing this book.<\/p>\n

As a writer, I want more than anything for my readers to have the same experience when reading my books.\u00a0 I don’t expect everyone will, but I want to be able to connect with a good chunk of my readers this way.\u00a0 David Gemmell does this for me, and my main question is therefore: how does he do it?<\/p>\n

Looking back, I’ve got to say that the book started good and steadily got better, right up until the awesome finish.\u00a0 The first two chapters were good, but around the third chapter, my expectations started to be exceeded.\u00a0 It wasn’t until the last half of the book that I realized just how much I was connecting with the characters, and when the climaxes hit, I found myself rooting for them more than I usually do.<\/p>\n

So I guess escalation had something to do with it.\u00a0 Gemmell starts with a pretty simple plot: Waylander has to evade a bunch of guild assassins out to kill him, but he doesn’t want to because his wife just died and he’s depressed.\u00a0 Then more and more characters get involved, and the stakes steadily grew until the fate of global empires hung in the balance.<\/p>\n

Yet throughout it all, the focus was always on the personal conflicts and the impact of the events on the individual characters.\u00a0 The vast armies sweeping the land were more of a background setting element than anything else; the real<\/em> story lay in the choices the characters made and why they made them. And when the characters started confronting their demons, I rooted for them as if they were my close, personal friends–or more than friends.<\/p>\n

Yet Waylander himself is very much a larger-than-life character.\u00a0 He’s a better hunter and tracker than the Sathuli tribesmen, a better swordsman than most of his opponents, by far the best crossbowman in the Drenai saga, and a cold, efficient killer with a body-count of hundreds.\u00a0 Not only is he rich enough to support the bankrupt king of Drenai singlehandedly with his vast financial assets, but in each of the three books in his trilogy, he plays the most pivotal role of any character in the rise and fall of nations and empires.<\/p>\n

And yet…I can still<\/em> connect with him.\u00a0 Why is that?<\/p>\n

Maybe it’s because he’s far from perfect.\u00a0 He vanquishes hundreds of soldiers, assassins, monsters, and demons, but he doesn’t escape uninjured.\u00a0 In Realm of the Wolf,<\/em> his less-than-perfect swordsmanship is a key element of the plot.<\/p>\n

It’s the internal conflict, however, that really makes me connect with him.\u00a0 Don’t get me wrong–I’m not a cold, unfeeling killer, nor have I lost my whole family to roving bandits–but I can understand his struggle to find happiness in the face of so much evil, both within him and without.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it’s not so much that I understand him as that I’m fascinated by him, and I don’t know why.\u00a0 It certainly helps that he has a soft side–that he’s not a complete monster.\u00a0 In all the books, his quest is always to save lives, not just to take them, and every once and a while he does something to keep my sympathy.\u00a0 The way he spared the Sathuli scout in Realm of the Wolf,<\/em> for example.<\/p>\n

Overall, though, I think it’s the characters and their conflicts that made this book come alive.\u00a0 Waylander<\/em> is basically an adventure tale with some interesting characters; In the Realm of the Wolf<\/em> is also an adventure tale, but the personal stakes are much higher, and the focus is more on the characters than on the rise and fall of empires.<\/p>\n

Anyways.\u00a0 I still feel like there’s something elusive that I’m not quite getting, but those are my thoughts after finishing this book.\u00a0 If you didn’t find it helpful, I hope you at least found it interesting.\u00a0 And if you have the chance, read the trilogy!\u00a0 It’s goood!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wow.\u00a0 I just finished In the Realm of the Wolf by David Gemmell a couple hours ago, and it was AMAZING.\u00a0 So amazing, in fact, that I want to write a post examining my reaction to it before I write the review. You know that ecstatic, otherworldly feeling you get when you finish an amazingly… Continue reading Thoughts after finishing In the Realm of the Wolf<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[112,193,113,403,222,599,117],"class_list":["post-2893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-character","tag-conflict","tag-david-gemmell","tag-death","tag-endings","tag-thoughts-reflections","tag-violence","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-KF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2893"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2912,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2893\/revisions\/2912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}