More Secrets of the Dragon Riders

Riding the Dragon – the child as an Author by Tobias Druitt

Enter Tobias Druitt, another author who decided to contribute to “Secrets of the Dragon Riders”, a compilation of fan essays on Inheritance edited by James A. Owen, and thus enrich this pathetic little world with his brilliant insight. Before you begin reading this, let me warn you—you may think you have seen the absurd, the incoherent babbling and the outrageous stupidity one often deals when trying to reason with an Inheritance fan. This pushes the bar far higher. I thought I had my share of fan hilarity, I thought I was a seasoned Anti, immune to their pointless ramblings. I thought that being called a Nazi (seriously) was as bad as it was going to get. Boy, was I to be proven wrong. So continue at your own discretion; you have been warned. I will not be held responsible (nor will ImpishIdea! No, seriously, we have lawyers).

Now if you read the first article- I wrote on Secrets of the Dragon Riders you know where I stand in the Age Debate. The too long; didn’t read summary: the age card is the most infantile (pun not intended, since it was inserted by an editor. I’m so sorry) marketing tactic ever invented. No, scratch that. It is the most infantile thing ever invented, a marketing ploy abused to catch the attention of teachers and parents and through that, sell scores and scores of writing of questionable quality, at best. And this guy is here defending it. Oh, this falcon will so draw blood to “wet its throat and [find] enough meat to fill its belly and sate its hunger” tonight.

Intro

Paolini’s youth is a central point of his greater story, but there are many aspects of that point beyond the generic question “He’s how old?“ that are important to consider.

A thought. No, there are no other aspects beyond “He’s how old?”. There is only one aspect, looming above the others, a dark, ominous behemoth of gargantuan proportions compared to which all the other aspects that would dare to exist are crushed by its impossible presence to a powder: Marketing. Yes, with a capital M. I am sufficiently familiar with the phenomenon to make this statement. There is nothing beyond. Even the vacuum has enough in it to appear overflowing with matter compared to the amount that is “important to consider” in the whole ridiculousness of the Age “debate” surrounding the Inheritance Cycle.

From a unique perspective (see his bio) Druitt examines the similarities between the story Paolini wrote and the story he lived, as the Eragon phenomenon caught fire and swept the world – and in the process underscores just how unique of an achievement it is for a child to create, sell, and survive an extraordinary story.

There is one thing in here I agree with, though-–the Eragon phenomenon catching fire. Though something is telling I am not thinking the same kind of fire the author had in mind. (Disclaimer: we advocate burning books only in jest. If you don’t believe us, print out this article and burn it)

Intro is over, here comes the actual thing. Ready?

Eragon, as most reading this know, is the story of a fifteen-year old boy who gets a dragon’s egg by accident. When the dragon hatches, he bonds to it and becomes its “Rider.” But his problems have only just begun. He is living in a kingdom governed by the evil Galbatorix, a Rider who wiped out all the other Riders and dragons apart from the thirteen evil Riders who had joined him, their dragons, and three eggs. So when evil servants of the evil king kill Eragon’s uncle (with whom he is living because his mother mysteriously disappeared after his birth, and never named his father), Eragon specifically sets out to get revenge, though he has other motives too. The book was published internationally in 2004 but had been published at the author Christopher Paolini’s home before, in 2002. Like his hero, Paolini was fifteen when he began writing it (though he was nineteen at the time of its international publication by Knopf).

Evil™ count: 5 (Extra point awarded for the double use of “evil” in a single sentence)

And, of course, Eragon is the same age as his author at the time he began writing the book. What kind of a self-respecting self–insert would he be if he were any other age? And can someone please tell me what „other motives“ does Eragon have for setting out? I only read the book about five times trying to find them, I must have missed something.

What I find interesting in the bold story of Eragon is that the book contains an obvious symbol of the process of its own creation. The plot concerns a child, a child learning something he would not otherwise know about or know how to do.

Yes. Because none of the other hundreds of generic young adult fantasy novels with pre-teen/teen protagonists touch the subject of coming of age and learning special skills at all. And obviously coming of age is something only a person who currently is coming of age themselves can understand, because all of the adults were born fully grown and knew all the skills they would need, experienced coming of age themselves. That makes the Inheritance experience so much more unique! Would you please stop insulting our intelligence and present, oh I don’t know, an actual argument?

Just as Eragon in the book learns about riding and looking after dragons, so Paolini learned about writing, and about publishing and self-promotion.

The first half of the sentence invokes some deeply disturbing mental images. The second does as well.

Both of these sets of skills—dragon care and writing – are things you would not expect a child to do, let alone (alas, the prejudice against the young creeps stealthily in here) be good at.

There is a reason for this, you see. Firstly, nobody would expect a child to care for a dragon because, if nobody told you yet, dragons are not really real. And nobody would expect a child to be good at writing because childhood itself is a phase of life where a person is developing, learning and slowly becoming the person they will be. Unless you are crazily gifted like Mozart, during childhood you only display gift, certain predispositions for activities you may be good at once you become older. Even these skills, though, need development over time. One is not born a genius, a master of his art. When I lived in the States, my art teacher told me: “An artist consists of 10% talent and 90% hard work.” What a child writing their first book displays is gift. When they age, learn and improve, only then do they become artists. So while a child can do some things exceptionally well for their age, that doesn’t mean that they are good on a general scale. Heck, even Mozart, who composed his first major piece around the age of seven, kept practicing for hours throughout the rest of his life. Because skill can not be obtained without practice and more practice. This is why nobody expects a child to be good enough at writing to become published, not because of some non–existing prejudice that is only real in Mr. Druitt’s head. And what is the prejudice remark supposed to mean, anyways? I wonder whether it will be expanded upon. (subtle foreshadowing)

The world of Eragon is just as surprised at the boy’s maturity as the world of books was at Paolini’s achievement.

Eragon. Mature. Excuse me while I go and slam my head into my desk repeatedly. But I guess Mr. Druitt does have a point here after all—who wouldn’t be surprised if Eragon showed signs of maturity? And after reading the book, I am certain there was more than one critic who had hard time believing it became so popular.

No wonder, then, that there is a clear parallel between the dragon, Saphira, and the story itself.

Clear? Not even a trained hunting falcon could find it! Oh wait—both cause destruction and despair—am I close?

I cannot say what Paolini’s experience of writing was like, but I can say from my own experience of writing that, like Saphira, stories do have a tendency to come up with ideas of their own about where they want to go, and it is very hard to get them to change their minds. They take you on long flights, and you don’t always know where or when those flights will end.

I am pretty sure, and the fact that Brisingr, the latest installment the the Only-God-Knows-How-Long-Is-It-Really-Going-To-Be series shows that Paolini doesn’t want the “flight” to end. He shows this unwillingness with filler and so much spam—if one was to eat it all, they would explode like Mr. Creosot in Meaning of Life; just to stuff enough of it in to make the whole thing too long to be published in a single volume and finally concluded. After all, it is earning him so much money, isn’t it? No wonder it is near impossible to change the stories’ minds about how long the “flights” are going to be.

Though in truth the whole thing came crashing down shortly after it took off.

There are other parallels between dragon-rearing and writing. Both of them are enjoyable and make you feel as if you have a special and secret identity that makes you different from other people, even your family.

The innuendo…make it stop!

Most people think both sound really great.

Let us examine the mental images the two invoke, shall we? First, still deeply disturbing. Second, a homeless guy bragging to everyone who walks slow enough to catch his mumbling how many books he had written and that indeed he is a great writer. Yeah, they really do sound great!

But just as most writers can tell starry-eyed dreamers about the negative side of being an author, so Paolini shows that being a Dragon Rider has a downside: Dragons are uncomfortable to ride, and your specialness attracts lots of attacks.

AAAGH! THE INNUENDO IT HURTSSS USSS PRECIOUSSSS!!!

Oh and Mr. Druitt actually refers to Eragon’s greatest quality as “specialness”. Do I even have to make fun of this?

As well, the dragon eventually grows beyond your control, as books do when they go out into the world . . . no writer can control the way a book is going to be read. Just as there are other, older writers, so there are other, older Dragon Riders for Eragon to meet. And riding a dragon, like writing, is in some respects a leveling experience: Small children can make up really brilliant stories, and a teenager like Eragon is boosted to adult status by owning a powerful dragon. As another essay in this volume shows, Eragon’s youth doesn’t stop him winning arguments with his elders, and often being right.

If you deal with a large, dangerous predator, you have to make damn sure it does not go out of control. Because when they do, bad things happen. Metaphor fail. No, wait, this one is actually spot on. Inheritance is like a giant, man–eating monster. It damages those who are not smart enough to know danger when it appears.

And he points out that writing indeed is a leveling experience, that it is a process. But wait, he goes on: “a teenager like Eragon is boosted to adult status by owning a powerful dragon.” What the hell is this? With one breath he says that coming of age is a process, with another he contradicts himself completely. Nobody is “boosted” to adult status. Let me do the metaphor this time: having a driver’s license does not mean you can merrily go ahead and enter car racing competitions the day you pick it up. That is, if you are not suicidal. Becoming an adult, just like becoming a good driver, is a process for crying out loud, it is a tedious transition during which your inner self, your very psyche is transformed, matured. Why do I have to keep repeating this? Age limits on certain rights are not there for the laughs. They are set for a certain reason. Which, as will be shown later on the article, Mr. Druitt considers near fascist.

One has to love this part, though—“Eragon is boosted to adult status by owning a powerful dragon.” Mr. Duitt is more of a perceptive reader than I thought. He noticed that dragons in Inheritance are treated like the lowest form of dirt, to the point where he refers to the relationship Mr. Paolini goes to such great trouble to glorify and shove down our throats as beautiful and deep as ownership. I would like to thank Mr. Duitt for making my point for me.

“Eragon’s youth doesn’t stop him winning arguments with his elders, and often being right.” This is not a sign of Eragon’s inner maturity (look, I got myself an oxymoron!). This is in the books because Eragon is a self–insert and Mr. Paolini wants us all to know how perfect, intelligent and mature for his age his precious widdle Gary Stu is. It is in no way beneficial to the point you are trying to make, Mr. Duitt, so please stop wasting my time with poorly researched claims, get to the point and make this suffering end. For all our sakes.

We then move on to discuss Eldest

Glaedr and his Rider Oromis are authority figures for Eragon, and train him to be a Rider. They learn an ancient magical language (echoes of Le Guin and Tolkien) and Saphira learns combat flying.

The “ancient magical language” in Inheritance is not as much an “echo of Le Guin and Tolkien” as it is a cacophony of screams of agony and indescribable pain.

Education, education, education!

Infodump filler! Infodump filler! Infodump filler!

Glaedr and Oromis replace Eragon’s parents as authority figures. Is this to do with Paolini himself breaking free of the parental help he stresses so heavily in the acknowledgments to Eragon?

Trust me, he ain’t breaking free of that one anytime soon.

Philip Pullman says that everyone’s story begins only when they realize they’ve been born into the wrong family. This is Eragon’s story too.

What the hell is this supposed to mean?

But while all this is true and very important, the point I find interesting in the story of Eragon is the age of its author. I will now attempt to explain why.

Please do. You have my undivided attention.

We are, so very often, told that we are at the pinnacle of freedom. Every adult can vote, has rights, yet those rights are not completely unrestricted so as to preserve the rights of others. But this is all a rather glorified lie.

Yes! We should all stop giving a crap about other people because our freedoms are limitless! Long live anarchy!

We are not at the pinnacle of freedom yet. There is one last group, one final minority everywhere, that has not achieved the rights and responsibilities that normally come with freedom.

Oh so that’s what it means. For a moment there I thought the guy is going to have an interesting thought. I wonder who the poor, unfairly oppressed minority are.

“Children. They have no political rights, and are…“

Stop it right there, criminal scum! Now back up. I think I may be seeing things that are not there.

Children.

On one hand, I am relieved I had not gone completely insane yet. On the other, I am afraid to continue reading.

They have no political rights, and are condemned for working, just as women were fifty and a hundred years ago. (Being condemned for working goes with low wage rates, or none, as women and illegal immigrants could tell you. So could the kids who work for fast-food chains.)

This…

Wow.

Just wow.

The closet lawyer inside me is screaming in excruciating pain and outrage.

I just can’t get over this paragraph. I just can’t. I am surprised the Armageddon is not happening this very moment. Where are the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Why aren’t the dead roaming the earth?

What. The. Hell.

If this feels like I am taking forever to get on with the whole thing, it is because it is taking me forever. For a few minutes I just stared at that…thing, still questioning my unquestionably questionable sanity, pondering all the implications of the quote. This is very, very wrong, on so many levels.

Deep breath.

There is a reason for these restrictions and this is the one of the first things they teach at law schools (The first thing being where the bathrooms are and if you think that law has anything to do with justice you picked the wrong school)—children do not have political rights because the lack the capacity to determine the seriousness of a legal action and the consequent liability. This is not a part of some Evil ™ government plot resulting in legalized age discrimination. This is a mechanism invented in order to protect the subjects of such action, in this case, the children. And did Mr. Druitt (more like Mr. Dumbbell at this point) bother to check any recent labor regulations? Child labor is unethical and frowned upon by all of civilized world! Has been for a while now! Wait, scratch that. It is not frowned upon. It is fucking illegal, excuse my French, and one can go to jail for a really long time if they are caught employing children. This makes one question the credibility, nay, the very mental health and common sense of Mr. Duitt. Did he even think, if he even is capable of such action, about the implications of what he spilled out on the paper? One here can only think of it as mass-murder of the Earth’s only oxygen producers. My money is on “NO”. The sheer idiocy of these few sentences is so mind-boggling no single brain can possibly process it. Hell, something is telling me even Deep Thought would be at a loss here. And how dare he muster enough guts to compare “restrictions” of child rights to the suffrage movement? Is this person serious? I sure hope he is not, because if he is God help us all.

In most countries, responsibility and rights are given to young people gradually, thus reflecting the process of maturing. I am going to talk about Central European legal system since this is the system I am intimately familiar with, not only by living in it, but also by studying to great depth and detail, since defending, analyzing and interpreting it will soon become something I will do for a living.

Here you get your ID at age of fifteen. Getting this ID officially makes you a citizen of the given state, albeit with limited rights. It is mostly liability that is bound to this event, since young citizens first have to learn limits of their rights before they are allowed to exercise them. Being fifteen and having an ID means that you are now the only person responsible for your actions. Up until then, if you do something, your parents are primarily the ones who are held liable, since up until that point they are your legal guardians. True, you get into a lot of trouble as well. But your parents are the ones who carry most of the weight for you. But when you reach the age of fifteen, it is assumed that you are capable of predicting the outcomes of your actions and choosing whether to go through with them or not. At the age of sixteen, you are allowed to work, but only within special boundaries set by the law and by international treaties, since at that age the young body and mind is still developing and cannot take as much strain as that of an adult. These are here for your own protection, dear children. So that you don’t become disfigured and don’t develop mental disorders before you even become an efficient part of the society. So in order to know your rights, you first have to know their limits. Why am I even explaining this?

Honestly, with each sentence I grow increasingly convinced that the only plausible explanation for all the…for all this is that Mr. Dumbbell is a troll. This is called maintaining order in society, it is not some OMG EVIL GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY AGE DISCTIMINATION!!!!11!!1 Something is telling me the author of this article is rather young himself. Okay, you want children to have political rights? You want them to be able to work? Here, Mr. Druitt, I am putting these up just to make you happy:

Besides – “fifty and a hundred years ago”? Who talks like that? Wait, this sounds awfully familiar… Yes, ladies and gentlemen, here you finally have it-–the proof that reading Inheritance does scramble young people’s brains.

Through my discussion of Eragon, I will focus on one space where many children have tried to break this rather oppressive mold: authorship.

The children are trying to break from oppression. I really have nothing to say here. I am at loss of words, which is a huge deal for me. I am really beginning to think that trying to comment on this article was a very bad idea. I feel myself losing all will to live. Where did I put that moonshine vodka I was saving for a cataclysmic event of global proportions? There you are, my sweet, we have a lot catching up to do.

There are several published child authors, most of whom write children’s fiction. I am one of these.

If you have children, go through their bookcases. If you find a book by this author there, take it, exorcise it and kill it. With fire. Then pack your stuff and move somewhere they never heard of Tobias Druitt. Come to think of it, you actually have a rather wide choice of options here.

There are hundreds or maybe thousands of other children who write and finish books. There are also many children who write and don’t finish books.

I covered that in the previous part of inflicting pain on self, err, previous article, on the topic.

Yet there always seems to be a semi-negative reaction if you tell any adult about your writing. A taken-aback response. (Here comes a whinge about my own experiences.) Some adults begin rabbitting on in an embarrassed way about how clever I must be and how great it is.

Somebody has an ego. Truly a fan who can stand next to his great idol—Christopher Paolini. Speaking of which, Paolini’s persistent refusal to lay an eye on a single negative review does say something about his “innate maturity”, as Mr. Owen put it, doesn’t it?

And they praise every piece of crap you come up with to not to hurt your fragile baby feelings, dear. They don’t want to make you cry.

I am not sure what they expect me to say my book is about, but when I say it is a retelling of Greek myth that brings back into it the original stories’ grittiness, they put on very shocked faces.

Which I believe to be the single appropriate reaction in this case.

Alternatively, they go into aggression mode, asking me how much of it I wrote and how much my mother did, asking me why it is under a pseudonym, etc.

I don’t know about the rest of you who are reading this, but even though my mom almost never trusted a single thing I said about anything when I was a kid (and in vast majority of cases for a good reason), she trusted me well enough to know that when I brought her something I wrote for her to evaluate, I would never stoop so low as to give her something somebody else wrote and claim it to be my original work. Neither would she ever write something for me. Ever. She believed that I should explore my creativity on my own and despite how old I was, she always provided constructive criticism—she never was one to lie to my face just to spare my feelings and for that, I will be grateful until the day I die. When I was twelve and my little brother was locked up in a hospital, I started writing stories about our dog for him—one for every day he was gone, wired to machines with tubes sticking out of him. There were many of these stories, but the moment I finished the first one, I proudly brought it to my mom, beaming with happiness and excited to hear what she thought. She read it, looked at me and said: “They are just talking and arguing. Nothing happens in the whole story, there is no plot. You can do better than that.” She pointed out the things I did right, but also the things that were wrong and told me to rewrite it. To put it in words Mr. Druitt would understand—she dealt with me as though I were an adult, an equal. Because providing the same treatment to authors of different ages is not blindly publishing every piece of, err, writing they have come up with, but also pointing out what is wrong with it as well—providing a little something I like to call constructive criticism. Look it up in the dictionary if you don’t know what it means, Mr. Druitt. In my opinion the two reasons nobody wants to publish child authors are:

1. In most cases they can’t write worth a damn, in the best case scenario there is potential which, however, needs some time and practice before it is fully realized.

2. If you criticize them, they start crying and take it as a personal attack, or even as oppression and discrimination based on age.

Which is also why most books by child authors (at least the ones I have come across) are only good as something to fill your cat’s litterbox with. And maybe even that would be too much of an honor.

I did finish the book and my brother, who eventually got better and came home from the hospital, got it as a Christmas gift from me (my Dad had it bound for me). My brother didn’t even finish the thing, that’s how bad it was. And that’s also why it is sitting in my top drawer. To remind myself of the way I already came, but mostly of the way that lies ahead. It is the main reason why I am my first and worst critic, even stricter than my mother who was the first person to teach me about criticism.

I actually agree with Mr. Duitt—children are being judged on a double standard. Though our reasoning is different. In my opinion, they are dealt with with too much fear, with too much worry; rather than going ahead and saying it, the adult tiptoes about the dreaded subject, lying to the child’s face, putting false hopes into their hearts. This, I believe, is the true nature of age discrimination against child authors.

Yet the recurrent theme of the reactions seems to be surprise that someone my age can have written and published three books, have finished the fourth and be revising it, and have begun the fifth. Surprise, or shock?

Both, actually.

This adult surprise and even alarm are the themes of this essay. I want to study the reactions toward child authors of children’s fiction from both adults and children, taking as my example Eragon and Eldest. My interest in Paolini’s achievement is that of a reader, a child reader, but also that of a fellow writer, a fellow child writer. We will see later why it’s important that I am not only a reader, but a child reader, and not only an author, but a fellow child author.

See the rant above.

Eragon and its critics.

I can barely contain my curiosity. What does this genius of literature have to say about us, heartless bastards driven by jealous spite?

Just one more thing—why do fans refer to the series as Inheritance so rarely? Why do they always talk about the whole thing, which now I think can be classified as an act of God, calling it Eragon? Funny as it may seem, it makes headlines such as the one we can see above, sound like the critics are making personal attacks against the character of Eragon and through him, against the author himself. I just thought it was funny.

To try to understand people’s dislike (or, indeed, their like) of Eragon I took a look at some reviews on Amazon.com.

Because Amazon is the single independent, impartial, fair and truthful indicator of whether the book is good or not. This. Explains. So very much.

But what is more worrying is the content of the reviews. Almost all the negative ones either say it is bad because it is derivative, bad because of its style (only one, and much of it was misspelled), or bad because it is in the style a teenager would write in.

All more than relevant claims, as everyone without a brain removal surgery would notice.

One of the others was attempting to get you to burn the book (!).

Which, in my humble opinion, is the correct way of dealing with such disgusting results of digestive process found in most chordates.

And the positive ones are almost all incorrectly spelled and grammatically wrong. I can understand a few reasonable typos, but they can’t ALL have happened to misspell several words.

Really? Are you sure? Some people may just have really big trouble typing…

Does that mean they are not very experienced reviewers—i.e., children? And the content of the positive reviews is the sort of thing the other reviews are criticizing: a lack of depth and critical commentary, and an uneasy use of playground slang, with clichés and descriptions of the book as “cool” abounding.

I wonder why that is, Sherlock. Also, if something is a book for children it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a certain merit. There are great children books out there, many of which are read even by adults, because they are well – written and are good as such, not just good “for the author age”. And trust me, children can tell crappy literature.

One five-star review just states the fact there will be four books.

Which in the eyes of the fans of Inheritance makes Paolini God.

I know this isn’t a proper study, that Amazon.com reviewers are a self-selecting sample who don’t represent anything but themselves.

What and amazing insight! Did you figure that out all by yourself? Genius!

But in the global village of Amazon.com, I still feel worried at this lack of inbetweeners, rational people who are trying to see the book’s good points and bad ones too.

The rational ones are the ones who give it the worst reviews. Because the book has no good points whatsoever. True, some things do have potential to be good but very soon they are killed in a particularly gruesome way and Paolini dances on their mutilated corpses before the potential even starts pondering that it could probably, maybe, be realized. One day. Possibly. is stomped to death

I can see that there are two different types of people reading the book, yelling at each other with fervor rather than engaging in rational debate.

So far I only observed this behavior in most rabid, sorry, avid, fans of the series.

The excerpt ends. Thank the gods, it is finally over. There is not enough mental strength in me to draw a conclusion on this. I will leave it up to you to take from it what you will. This will sum up my feelings about the extract perfectly:

Thank you for taking your time to read.

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