Too often, novels that start out good and end with a satisfying twist, lose traction somewhere in the second half. The best that can be said of those parts is that “stuff happens.” Nothing important to the story, nothing important about the character, nothing that propels the plot forward. Just stuff happening. Ho hum. This seems especially true of authors who are extremely profitable. I don’t know if the editors just give a cursory look before passing the manuscript on to be published, if they are too intimidated to ask for rewrites, if deadlines proscribe rewrites, or if it’s simply that no one cares because no matter how good or bad the book is, it will still make a fortune.
The Wheel of Time books are a good example of this. The first seven are generally good, sometimes great, and sometimes truly brilliant, but after those books, the brilliance fades, the lovely writing gets lost in the muddle, and the best that can be said is that “stuff happens.” There are still remarkable parts, but those parts are surrounded by hundreds of pages where things happen, but they don’t seem to have anything to do with the thrust of the book, don’t seem to move anyone closer to the last cosmic battle that will determine if life and even the universe will continue as it is.
I understand that Robert Jordan liked turning fantasy tropes on their end, for example, making women major players (in most fantasy written before him, women had bit parts if that). He also was playing against the lone hero concept, not just with three interconnected heroes, but also with the idea that the entire world had to cooperate to make it possible for the forces of light to win against the darkness. But, as I pointed out before, what an author intends and what ends up in readers minds is not always the same thing.
Some people like those parts, where tens of thousands of words are devoted to the women characters setting up their power bases, and I sort of understand the necessity, but not the huge portions of books devoted to their power grabs. A lot could be simply skipped, later showing that they achieved their goals, because as the books stand, two of major heroes mostly disappeared, one for an entire book. The third one’s story could be vastly truncated, especially since the same basic story (his fight with himself about whether or not he is a leader) plays out again and again. Even after he accepts leadership, there is a whole other book that repeats that entire character arc. Admittedly, this repeated arc is not Jordan’s fault, but the fault of the author who finished the series, since the substitute apparently didn’t pay attention to the fact that the characters had almost all become who they needed to be to go to battle, and so made a hash of it.
Still, I can understand why people don’t care that those final books didn’t make sense. His editor didn’t care. Since she was also Jordan’s wife, I imagine ending the series in any way possible was her way of honoring him and his last wishes. The publisher certainly didn’t care. A barrelful of money rested on those books. And most readers didn’t care because there was an ending to a series they had lived with for most of their lives. Besides, after all those books where stuff just happened without any sense that the story was moving forward, people were thrilled that the story finally pushed toward to an ending. (Not THE ending, but an ending.)
In the last books that Jordan wrote, there are still flashes of brilliance, still parts where exciting events took place, but yikes. The rest of it should have cut considerably by a few hundred thousand words or more, but apparently no one dared suggest such a thing to such a popular author.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
Bertram's Blog 
January 29, 2026 at 5:58 pm
Your reasoning makes perfect sense, and your lament isn’t one limited to that particular series. I’ve seen it, where later books by a well known author lack the quality of their earlier writing, but people are eager to forgive that because of the writer’s notoriety. Nobody expects a successful author’s every book to be a masterpiece, but one would think the publisher would insist some basic editing happen when there are obvious shortcomings. If they’re noticeable to us as readers, they must be even more so to the agent and/or publishing staff. There is or should be a reputation to maintain.
In my earliest years, one of the very elementary writing things I heard from professionals in the industry was that as a writer it was my job to make sure every word, sentence, paragraph and page served a purpose. If it didn’t, it should be cut out. No matter how well written, if it was just to pad the wordcount, “kill those darlings.” A lot of otherwise good stories today could have been improved by following the advice.
January 29, 2026 at 6:12 pm
Yep, kill those darlings. First rule of writing! Even with authors who don’t think there are any rules, there are. W. Sommerset Maugham supposedly said, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.” Despite that, killing your darlings is definitely important, but apparently only for people like me on the low end of the scale. When you reach superstardom, you can indulge yourself however you want because fans will still buy and publishers will still make money. In a way I can understand — after all, it IS about money and not superlative writing. (Though I could wish otherwise.)