I had a ton of other ideas for this post, but I finally got my copy of The Wise Man’s Fear (by Patrick Rothfuss) back from my friend’s car and I’ve read over a hundred pages in the last few hours despite having read the book four or five times in the past. As I read it and it’s predecessor, The Name of the Wind, I always find myself deliciously enviable of how loving Rothfuss crafted his world, his characters and his story. In something of a rarity in writing, Rothfuss manages to balance brilliant and witty characters with a world rich and full that it seems to expand and grow beyond the pages of the books he has crafted thus far. Every place has a thousand stories you can almost feel trying to push against the story he is telling, all of them wanting to burst free into the world. His work engrosses me, wraps me in a story I already know, in parts I’ve memorized. I take a deep breath at the beauty of passages, fight away tears at the elegance of some writing. I could go on and on, but that is not the point of this post. Instead, I want too look at something I think Rothfuss does with amazing audacity and grace and how it has made his books masterpieces.
There are, as far as I am concerned, three Great Arts. The art of Story, the art of Music and the art of Image. However, since the art of Image is largely lost on me we can safely lay it aside for the time being. The last two arts are both old friends and mysteries deeper than any I know. The art of Music is a realm of magic to me, something I can partake in and enjoy but never create. Music is very much a part of my life, a part of my writing and everything else I do but it is never my own. I always have music somewhere, the same twelve hundred songs on endless repeat and never growing old. I am not ashamed to admit I listen and consume others’ works without ever trying or ever being able to make my own music. Music is human, it’s primal and it’s something everyone understands in some manner or other. Those magi who hunt down the melodies and tunes from the wilds of humanity are miracle workers playing with a force of nature.
The art of Story is its own realm of magic, but this realm is mine. I’m learning, an apprentice stumbling through his early spells but I am learning and growing as a writer. Here the secrets of how to make a reader feel, care and lose themselves in a Story are slowly opening themselves to me. However, as with all the Arts, the art of Story has countless smaller arts. Two of the most significant ones are the art of Writing and the art of Storytelling. “But these are the same thing!” You exclaim dramatically. You are wrong and here is why. I can write a novel and it will be a story, a world and characters you care about. If I’m lucky and skilled, it will be a story you continue to return too and maybe blog about yourself one day. This is the art of Writing, and here I am a skilled student. The art of Storytelling is a far older Art. It dates back as far as our first ancestors, cautionary tales told around low burning campfires to wide-eyed adolescents. They are tales that are meant to be told not read. They are meant to be remembered and shared. A storyteller does not own the story he shares, instead he has learned the story he tells until his mastery leads him to teach others. If I give you a book, you may love it and memorize its every twist and turn, quirk and oddity, but you will never attempt to tell the story it shares. Instead you’ll loan your battered and worn copy to those you trust, and recommend it to everyone who will listen in. A book is a good friend, one who is always there for you to offer an escape. A story is the opposite, it is fleeting and ephemeral, worthless to know yourself but priceless when shared. To me, those who are artistans of Storytelling, those who can create new stories ontop of retelling old stories own a skill wholeheartedly unique, though not wholly separate, from the skills of us writers.
What Rothfuss does, and I have no idea how he does it, is somehow craft a work that combines both arts of Story I talked about as well as the art of Music into a single book. Kvothe is a musician and that is his core, and somehow Rothfuss not only conveys this but the very sense of the music itself. As you read the book, you get a distinct feeling that it has a rhythm, beat and melody that some are somehow sung across every page. It is a complex song with no music at all. Rothfuss is also a fantastic Storyteller, I’ve heard him speak and I can attest to that. Somehow he manages, within the scope of the Song he weaves, to tell stories. Old stories, the kind of stories you would share time and time again over a pint of ale. These are the kind of stories that you’d tell when no one could read and winter made for a slow evening. It’s not just the stories of Taborlin the Great and the Ignorant Ruh but it’s the entire series, I would willing tell Kvothe’s story to friends and let it fall into legend. At the same time, while he is already juggling a song without music and a telling a story without speaking, he is writing a fantastic book. He’s not simply recording the stories that are Told and the Song unsung but he is writing a story, exercise the second art of Story to tie Storytelling and Music into a single package.
What all of that means, is somehow Rothfuss satisfies so many desire in a single blast that he might as well be Kvothe, musician, storyteller and legend extraordinaire. It makes the Kingerkiller Chronicles masterpieces of literature. It is also a bar I fear I will never reach. Not because I am a bad apprentice of the art of Story but because I lack that third crucial thing, an ability to manipulate Music. I will, with any luck, hit a point were I become a Storyteller and a Writer and I can weave the two arts into fantastic books, but that third magic may forever escape me. I’m okay with this, because I know I’m going to find a different third that may never touch my books but I may still leave a tale or two behind that blend all three.