Rick's Writing Voice (Rant)
[I'm not trying to *expose* Rick here or anything. I only want to complain about his writing style here because rereading the books, it's frustrating me a lot. Just trying to get this off my chest.]
On a line-to-line level, Rick is incompetent at writing. He's so ass.
This paragraph single-handedly gave me the urge to write this post:
The stone walls glowed. The air felt as if we were walking through an oven. The tunnel sloped down and I could hear a loud roar, like a river of metal. The spider skittered along, with Annabeth right behind.
This paragraph is just an example among many others of Rick's inability to write engaging descriptions and the weakness of his voice when you zoom in on a paragraph-scale.
There's a blatant lack of immersive details and sensory descriptions.
He told us briefly that the stone walls glowed, when he could've described how they cast eery orange highlights in Annabeth's curls.
He told us that the air feels like they're walking in an oven, when he could've given more claustrophobic details, like how their Camp HB T-shirts clinged to their bodies, or how Percy struggled to keep a hold of Riptide because of his sweaty palms, or how it felt like the hot air was making his feet heavier, turning each new step into a weight-lifting workout.
He told us the spider was skittering along with Annabeth tailing it, when he could've said that the heat was making Percy's head so dizzy, the most he could make of the spider was a blurry black spot moving in zigzags. He could've added that Percy was grateful for Annabeth being here to lead the way, because he would've been lost otherwise.
2. There's a lack of rhythm between sentences.
To add on, there's no interesting variation in Rick's sentence structures. Far too often, sentences start in the exact same way, in this example with a noun (The stone walls, The air, The tunnel, The spider) which makes it sound repetitive and monotonous.
Thus, if I could describe Rick's writing voice with one word, it would be "staccato." Separate. Individual.
Sentences isolate themselves, as if they hate working together.
Paragaphs reluctantly give way to other paragraphs.
Scenes rarely vary in length, and the way they transition from one to the next looks like they've been cut with terrible scissors and stuck with tons of glue by a four years old. A very clumsy four years old.
Here is another frustrating example:
Annabeth went to join her brethren from the Athena cabin, who had set up a command tent and were directing operations. A gray banner with an owl fluttered outside the tent. Our security chef, Argus, stood guard at the door. Aphrodite's children were running around straightening everybody's armor and offering to comb the tangles out of our horsehair plumes. Even Dionysus' kids had found something to do. The god himself was still nowhere to be seen, but his two blond twin sons were running around providing all the sweaty warriors with water bottles and juice boxes.
3. Redundancies and unintented repetitions.
"[Greek god]'s children were running around" is used twice.
4. Impersonal and disembodied descriptions.
Where is Percy in this paragraph? The books are from his point of view, after all, yet it feels like he's not even part of the scene, as if he's observing it from high up in the clouds or something.
The effect is to detach the readers from the camp. We can't get into the scene, because Percy isn't in there either. He is not a participant.
Maybe Percy tried to follow Annabeth in the Athena Cabin, but was denied by Argus, who glared at him with just one of his eyes, as if he could not afford to spare the ninety-nine others.
Maybe a little boy from Aphrodite's Cabin jogged to Percy and stood on his tippy-toes to help fasten his chest armor. Maybe Percy thanked him by ruffling his hair, even though he didn't really need the help. The Aphrodite boy would grin and then run on to help the next camper, eager to make himself more useful.
Maybe Percy got shoved out of the way by an Ares child who yelled at him to move his butt, not even bothering to look back. Maybe Percy pushed back the grape juice that one of the Dionysus twin was trying to force him to drink.
No wonder you can't feel much when the writing is this bland and unimpressive. I'm not asking for earth-shattering prose, or for Rick to write award-winning similes and metaphors. But I beg, give this man writing lessons. He needs those. At the very least so he is able to invite anyone into his world.
