Interestingly,he loathed the major fantasy touchstone of the time, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series...

the way I've always heard it is that he only put the LotR stuff in because his friends/players wouldn't quit begging him to do so. No idea if that's true or not of course.

I thought I was alone.

The first half of Fellowship is definitely the worst example of pacing i've ever read, and is definitely a dull slog. However beyond that point I find the sense of adventure really kicks into gear and makes it very compelling. But as with everything taste is subjective.

Get the fuck out. LotR had become explosively popular by the 1960's, and its popularity didn't wane for decades (rather, it spread internationally). It would be the single closest anything Fantasy had come to becoming well-known and acknowledged at a remotely mainstream level, until first the Lord of the Rings movies, and then, arguably Game of Thrones.

If you're ONLY talking about the united states, then maybe Conan pulps too, sure.

I love LotR, but Tolkein was a better world builder than fiction writer. I'm sure Tolkein knew this, as LotR seemed to exist as a vehicle to share his world. You can tell by the way he describes every piece of scenery, giving far more information than is relevant to the plot at hand, and more than the characters "on screen" would even know.

>dubs followed by dubs followed by trips
digits tell the truth user

Hey, Conan and Lankhmar are my jam. I love that pulpy scifi fantasy.

Those are quads, user.

Dude it's sweet as hell

They do certainly seem far more DnD than Tolkein, but Tolkein is vastly more known.

Everybody thinks LotR is so awesome. My old girlfriend was in love with the thing. I made three attempts--years apart--to get through it. Each time it was The Two Towers that did me in. The first time I made it maybe a third of the way through it. The second time I made it maybe half way. The third time I gave myself permission to skim through shit I found boring or pointless, but that still only got me about two-thirds of the way through. I started from the beginning all three times, so The Fellowship of the Rings posed no obstacle (I'm not saying it didn't have issues, and I may have stumbled once or twice, but I never fell). And I had no trouble making it through The Hobbit. But The Two Towers is where boring-as-fuck crashes into stupid-as-crap. Tolkien does have an interesting setting with a rich history--you have to give him that--but he's a terrible storyteller. He's boring and the plot is almost peripheral, and contains plenty of nonsensical bullshit.

Frodo was indeed a pain. It's a shame that so few people ever admit to disliking LotR and treat it like some kind of fantasy Dead Sea Scrolls.

>The first half of Fellowship is definitely the worst example of pacing i've ever read, and is definitely a dull slog. However beyond that point I find the sense of adventure really kicks into gear and makes it very compelling.
Fellowship definitely has its issues, but it's a fuck cakewalk compared to The Two Towers. In fact, every single person I've talked to who failed to make it through LotR, but who at least made a decent go of it (and didn't stop 30 pages in), was defeated by The Two Towers.

>can't stand the serious story but could get engaged with the fairy tale written for schoolchildren
Really jogs me nog it dogs.

The Hobbit isn't as lost up its own ass and reads less like an agronomy report.

D&D is undoubtedly sword & sorcery. Wasn't too long ago that I dove into some old D&D stuff and I'm pretty sure I read something in Gygax' hand flat out stating it pretty much flat out.
I'll be damned if I can remember where it was though.

Honestly, whether Gygax preferred it or not, Sword & Sorcery was probably better suited as a starting point for the genre anyway. It sets very clear character goals that translate into gameplay easily, without too many headaches and tough questions.
"Go into the evil snake cult's temple and steal the giant ruby out of the eyesocket of their idol" sets up a focused gameplay experience much better than "there's an evil force to the east that wants its ring back, and for now we have to go talk to an elf dude who lives pretty far away about what to do about it."

Plus, the first is easier to come up with. Pulps were always initially about gripping the reader quickly (or people wouldn't take them home with them.)

LotR isn't a fantasy book, at least not in the modern sense. It's an artificial ancient text, a pseudo-Beowulf. If you actually pay attention to the meta-narative just about all of the book's faults are intentional.
The fictional history of the work is that it's based on the journals of Frodo, Bilbo, and Merry (Red Book of Westmarch). This was then translated and added to by later fictional editors (including a post-Aragorn Steward of Gondor, iirc). Tolkien is only supposed to be the most recent translator/editor, hence the "Concerning Hobbits" bit.

Ever wonder how Gandalf could translate ancient elvish into modern English on the fly and have it rhyme? He couldn't, but Tolkien, or one of the fictional editors, did or for us so we as modern readers could understand it better. Just like Beowulf, which has pieces missing in the oldest copies we have, we don't see that aspect of the book when we read it since an editor filed in the gaps.

If you read it out loud the tone and style actually change. Parts sound like a journal, others like epic poetry, and others like a fairy tale.

It's a fantastically brilliant work designed to be read by philologists and other literature professor types. It would be pretentious as shit, except he succeeded.

Regular people, like you and me, only know about the damn thing because hippies at Woodstock passed around illegal bootleg copies like they were drugs. Apparently this disappointed Tolkien.

The hobbit instead keeps singing because it's afraid the assumed 8 year old reader will get bored otherwise.
And lotr reads like a history book.

Different strokes for different folks.
Personally, I also liked the Hobbit, read it when I was a wee little lad. Comfy as fuck.

Doesn't surprise me one bit.
The dungeon delving of D&D is straight out of howard's Conan stories.
The alignment system of Law vs Chaos (as it originally was, Good and Evil weren't alignments) was lifted directly from the Sword and Sorcery of Michael Moorcock's Elric stories and others of his work.
The feel of having buddy adventurers and a "party" seems to stem a lot from Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories.
Sword and Sorcery is better for telling stories at the D&D table than epic fantasy is.

No, you're thinking of the Appendices. No history textbook is written narrative style.
It reads like historical fiction written be a man obsessed with historical accuracy.

It is supposed to be an actual written historical account being translated from Westron to English so it was probably intentional.
Children of Hurin is better

That sort of applies to every writer, though, at least if you want something anyone's going to enjoy. You have strengths and weaknesses, and you play to your strengths. The world of ASOIAF doesn't make much sense unless you look at it as a vehicle for drama and character moments. Kushiel's Legacy is carefully crafted to justify intrigue tons and tons of boning. The world of Gentleman Bastard exists for heists and profanity to happen in. It's only a real flaw when writers can't recognize their limitations and try to be all things to all people, like Patrick Rothfuss does.

Exactly.

>No history textbook is written narrative style.
Look up "narrative history." It is a way of writing history books that used to be common, before you got spoonfed the bland history books that you're used to in academia now.

About the writing style or Morgoth making Hurin watch his son fuck up in life being a better book than a midget's year-long stroll?

You're not wrong about LotR, but The Hobbit suits a D&D campaign pretty well.

>What's nuance?
>What do you mean the world is complex and reality doesn't fit into easily digestible narratives without ignoring large important chunks of it?
>I'm going to call everything new I don't like spoonfeeding even if it's literally the opposite of that

As far as I'm concerned, the missy quintessential example of a great worldbuilder but a mediocre writer/storyteller is Frank Herbert.
The ideas in Dune are amazing, but fuck me the guy needed a better editor, or at least someone to tell him that spoiling shit 100s of pages in advance is bad.

D&D used to be sword & sorcery before AD&D 2e. (Arguably the change already happened during 1e's lifespan) Since then, it's (trying to be) LotR-style epic fantasy.

Get pissy if you want, I'm just telling you it already exists and it's been done well before.
When I say spoonfeeding, I'm referring to the way schools show one view of history and one way that history can be reported and treat it as the only way. It was a criticism of the current system.
Maybe analyze why you take things so personally on an anonymous image board about games lol

I'm not pissy or taking things personally. Just explaining the real reasons no one takes narrative history seriously anymore

The key to Dune is to stop with Dune. Everything after the first book is a dim reflection at best.

so his creation of Greyhawk was a "how middle earth should have been done" sort of take on things? "I'll take your badly executed idea, AND FIX IT"

>reads like a history book.
and there in-lies why it's so dang boring.

>If I didn't enjoy it myself then there's no way that anybody else could have

Hard incurable autism. Someone with this level of self-absorption is probably That Guy in-game too.

And I don't even r8 LotR.

Matt Colville even used the two as an example of good and bad DMing.

youtube.com/watch?v=EkXMxiAGUWg

>And lotr reads like a history book.
Yeah.. boring.

it takes incurable autism to enjoy them.

Dawg it sure as fuck doesn't read like a history book. Pretentious agronomics report fits it best.

People pretending to like it are 90% masochistic posers imho.

>"u mad" plus carefully selected image macro
>accuses others of trying too hard on the 4chins

lol kys

>if you like what I don't you must enjoy pain
Are you gonna cry about echidna wars next?

That gets thrown around a lot, but Tolkien's writing was usually alright. It's just that his worst prose is in his most popular novel. It also has frankly terrible pacing. See The Hobbit, Farmer Gilles of Ham (both of which, as far as I'm aware, were pretty critically acclaimed which isn't something you can say of LotR outside of the fantasy community) and Children of Hurin.

It's just that his idea in LotR about writing a faux-national epic using a constructed world while mimicking several forms of literature from fairy tales to the sagas each chapter was not only too ambitious for his actual writing skill, it bored contemporary critics and flew over the heads of the general public (who enjoyed it anyways).

Now, Tolkien's most relevant contribution to academia is a series of lectures about Beowulf, but even a lot of Tolkien nerds don't know that.

or rather a bit of intelligence and patience. something i'm sure you're lacking a great deal of.

>not liking God-Emperor

It's like you missed the whole fucking point you mongoloid.

As influential as the LOTR books were, I don't begrudge anyone who didn't like them. The series is definitely not for everyone.

If you really want to know the story, just watch the Peter Jackson films. They changed a bunch of things in the adaptation, and not all for the better in my opinion, but I feel that most of the story's themes and message survived intact. Watch them, then if you feel like finding out what you missed, go back and read the books.

>It's just that his idea in LotR about writing a faux-national epic using a constructed world while mimicking several forms of literature from fairy tales to the sagas each chapter was not only too ambitious for his actual writing skill,
This user said it. Tolkien had a huge and fantastic idea but overreached. He is important as an innovator opening up a whole new field but his actually work is somewhat mediocre. Pacing and storytelling are weak imho.

People sucking tolkiens dick are the ones obsessed with authenticity. The same cancerous crowd hyping vinyl.

We can all agree that the hobbit movies are actually harmful to your health.

As somebody with a bachelor's degree in history, I don't think LotR reads that much like a history book, at least not a good one. A good history book doesn't meander like LotR does; it doesn't spend so much time on superfluous bullshit; and any narrative it might have holds together better. I enjoy a good history book. I did not enjoy LotR.

Not him, but I hated God-Emperor until things finally started clicking together. After that, I hated it a little less, and it's grown on me over the years because from a high-level conceptual perspective it's definitely a great conclusion to the story arc of the first 3 books. I sure as hell wouldn't read it again though.

Fuck.
Those.
Movies.

It reads like a novel from a time when popular fiction could expect more patience and literacy from its readers.

You don't have to like LotR, there's no shame in not having any time for 1000 page epics that ease you into the story with mushroom picking and fireworks displays, but it's always embarrassing when people that don't like it try to pretend Tolkien just couldn't write fiction and the whole thing reads like a textbook. It's just a straight up lie. His prose is always at minimum readable and sometimes quite pretty and in LotR he manages the trick of switching between its different registers, from heroic to hobbit-talk, quite deftly. It's a downright odd mashup of a book even among the genre of fat fantasy tomes and technically it's executed about as well as it could have been.

Yes, he was right: Tolkien may have been a fantastic worldbuilder but he either couldn't or made no effort to hold the attention of his readers unless they were expected to be children (see: Hobbit.) It feels like the literary equivalent of a literal autist (not meme autist) explaining their specialized interest in excruciating detail, totally oblivious to, or totally uncaring of, whether or not you are actually interrested.

This isn't an uncommon problem in the novel form actually, but the author literally gave me no incentive to keep reading. For books meant to entertain the emergent middle class during the winters before mass media was a thing, most of whom COULD afford novels, but COULDN'T afford the expensive pastimes of the old gentry, eating time was itself of value, and so eating extra time without adding extra value was fine. However, in 2017, that makes no sense: there's more media out there than can possibly be consumed in a lifetime, so the value to filler/padding text is negative rather than positive. This is actually why I generally see the Novel as a literary form tailored to a particular point in time that's NOT this one. Just ask yourself, of almost any novel you've read "what would have been lost in shortening it to a novella and/or short story." For the overwhelming majority, the answer is "nothing but time." There are of course exceptions; Philip K Dick comes to mind, as do the "trashier" pulp-fantasy novelists who inspired the original creators of D&D (at-least on their good days... sometimes you could feel the financial obligation to imitate Tolkien's filler/padding text seeping in.)

But back to Tolkien: the thing is, I get the distinct impression that he genuinely didn't CARE if his work was compelling or able to hold the attention of readers, except when he was specifically hired to write for children. He had a world and a plot, and wanted to describe it in excruciating detail to people.

I saw the first movie in the theater. "Well, I'm not paying to see another one of those."

I watched a pirated copy of the second movie that my friend had. "Well, I'm not wasting my time watching another one of those."

So I never saw the third movie. I'm pretty happy about that.

>spends a solid 50% of its time talking about literally nothing, almost as bad as moby dick
>lol just be patient inferiorbrain

First rule of editing they ever taught me is, if you can remove it and it doesn't matter, you're just wasting the audience's time.

>could expect more patience and literacy from its readers
> His prose is always at minimum readable
>It's a downright odd mashup of a book even among the genre of fat fantasy tomes

>muuh the reader back then was smarter and more patient
>he could write I mean LoTR had a weird not really functioning premise and his prose was okay most of the time

Why the fuck would you invest the time ?

There are tons of authors who picked up the premise and who were just better writers.

And tolkien fags should be ashamed of playing the its okay if you can't read a 1000 pages. Niqqa i read dry af military history in my free time. The question is if a book is worth it and for LoTR thats just not the case.

>shitting on moby dick
if you're an editor, it's an embarassment for the whole fucking industry.

Everbody can do compelling world building with a 100000 words. Making it short and compelling is the art. Subtile hints encouraging ones fantasy and not two centuries of harvest reports.

I am not a NEET ffs. Give me something that is worth wasting time on.

there's tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people that disagree with you.

There are millions of people watching honey boo boo. Thats not a strong argument.

>Yes, he was right: Tolkien may have been a fantastic worldbuilder but he either couldn't or made no effort to hold the attention of his readers unless they were expected to be children (see: Hobbit.)
Ok, I'm not picking on you for any particular reason, as opposed to any of the other anti-tolkien guys in this thread, but seriously, what the fuck?

Why do you think he starts off his novels, and rarely strays the point of view narration from the stand ins for a late 19th century/early 20th century British reader, and not the archaic and exotic worldviews that his other characters hold? Why do you think he consistently plays up modern dilemmas and moral stances in a dark ages sort of setting where they're wildly anachronistic, but not the the people whom he expects to read the book? Why do you think he spends so much time interlacing plot lines through, and not just telling things chronologically, if not for the reader that he hopes will appreciate these sorts of touches?

> I get the distinct impression that he genuinely didn't CARE if his work was compelling or able to hold the attention of readers, except when he was specifically hired to write for children
You would be completely wrong, and you'd know this if you bothered to look through things like his drafts.

Please, cite to some of these "wasted" passages talking about "literally nothing".

I'm curious as to what you think the "premise" of LoTR is. I can pretty much guarantee it's not what Tolkien intended.

Exactly what I thought of LotR 3 and most of 2. Atrocious, like British people and their super retarded banter
>great thread!
No this OP thread is a huge

What Tolkien intended? Probably some autistic way to make his magical realm more real too him.

What I meant with premise: Fictional worlds built with high detail.

I do feel that many, if not most novels are longer than they need to be. Not that I mind long books, mind you, but they shouldn't be longer than their story demands. At some point in most novels, I get the distinct impression the author is padding things out--treading water until it's time to actually bring things together. Either that, or there's just more space than the author knows how to properly manage. So I would prefer that novellas were the standard rather than novels. But until recently at least, I think novels worked better commercially, and at this point they have tradition behind them. But regardless of this, there are plenty of good novels that absolutely need to be as long as they are, so Tolkien can't escape so easily.

>Everbody can do compelling world building with a 100000 words. Making it short and compelling is the art. Subtile hints encouraging ones fantasy and not two centuries of harvest reports.
So you mean, like how you derive most of the culture of Rohan and Gondor, not from exposition, but from the juxtaposition of the Faramir interrogating Frodo and Sam to the Eomer interrogating Aragorn and co scenes?

Moby Dick is fucking fantastic, the chapters that are just whaling trivia in particular. Novels don't have the same constraints as screenwriting or technical writing or a bunch of other formats - who gives a shit if this chapter doesn't advance the plot as long as it read well?

>There are tons of authors who picked up the premise and who were just better writers.

Are there? There are plenty of other good fantasy writers, but they're all doing something quite different. I can't think of anyone who's written an epic-war-against-evil novel that doesn't just come off as a cheap knockoff of Lord of the Rings.

I don't mean to suggest either that if you don't enjoy it then you're a cretin that doesn't have the attention span for long novels. I know plenty of people who are better read than me who couldn't get into it. It's worth investing the time only if you find bumbling hobbit adventures entertaining for their own sake, but it's just wrong to claim those adventures are clumsily written.

Partially?

Tolkien was at times so utterly rammed up his own ass when it came to world building that you could get entirely lost in paragraph after paragraph explaining just how shitty the swamp is that Frodo is in at the moment.

But on the other hand, there's some genuinely iconic stuff that came from the ridiculously detailed myth-construction, and he literally caused a ton of fantasy archetypes to become a thing (for good and bad reasons).

I fell asleep reading some sections in Two Towers, and the acid trip of Bombadil's shenanigans, but by and large I think my life was enriched by spending the time reading LoTR and Bilbo for that matter.

Fuck Silmarillion though, that thing is impenetrable and unreadable. I've only kept it in my bookshelf for aesthetic reasons and 'nerd cred'.

You do realize that none of the LoTR books are novels, right? A novel is something distinct from "A long book".

This goes for you too. (If you're a different user). None of the LoTR books are novels. I don't know why you'd call them such or judge them as such, unless you think any prose work above 200 pages is a novel or some nonsense.

>Why do you think he starts off his novels, and rarely strays the point of view narration from the stand ins for a late 19th century/early 20th century British reader, and not the archaic and exotic worldviews that his other characters hold?
Probably because he was an early 20th century British man, and you write what you know.
>Why do you think he consistently plays up modern dilemmas and moral stances in a dark ages sort of setting where they're wildly anachronistic, but not the the people whom he expects to read the book?
Probably because he, himself is an early 20th century Brirish man and you write what you know.
>Why do you think he spends so much time interlacing plot lines through, and not just telling things chronologically, if not for the reader that he hopes will appreciate these sorts of touches?
Maybe he was genuinely on the spectrum and mistook structural divergence for compelling action. Plenty of modern authors make that mistake as well.
>You would be completely wrong, and you'd know this if you bothered to look through things like his drafts.
Jesus, the original was long enough. If the text themselves aren't interesting enough to justify their time sink, why would I go even further and go through his drafts on top of that to compare them? Dear god.

Let me ask you this: what can you get from an actual Tolkien text that you can't get faster and better, in 2017, from the Middle Earth Wiki?

Like I said his world was brilliant, but we live in a world where SOMEONE has already read it and made a Wiki out of it, and we live in a world where filler/padding text just takes time out of your life where you could be having fun. Tolkien, and the Novel in general, are relics of his time.

One of the unique, I'll call them strengths, of LotR is that it does in fact leave out the reams of detail that the author had actually spent decades writing about his imaginary world and just shows us the world as experienced by characters that don't know much about it.

It's fairly easy to hint at a rich history by dropping some names without knowing exactly what they're referencing. It's much more restrained/intriguingly psychotic to write your complete mythos first and then start a commercial novel that draws on it.

>A novel is something distinct from "A long book".

Uh, sure. It's a long book that is a continuous work of prose fiction. What's your definition?

>You do realize that none of the LoTR books are novels, right?
How do you figure?

>He can't figure out the Silmarilion
Have you tried the Cat in the Hat?

like are you complaining because it;s sometimes published in three volumes? because serialising a novel is not exactly an unorthodox concept.

In this thread: People who never bothered to look at Appendix N.

Gygax wanted a game, Tolkien a story. It's apples to oranges.

It's also a matter of your audience. You could play a slice of life RPG where the goal was to be valedictorian of high school, with absolutely no violence or action, and some people would love it.

Compare it to, I don't know, video games. For example, I like Stardew Valley. You can't lose in SDV. You're always making forward progress somehow, but the means and speed of it is up to you. There's no ultimate risk of failure. But I still love the comfy atmosphere and growing my farm day over day. It contrasts the stress I have over the 9-5 and lets me unwind. Others might think that it's boring bullshit with no action and no risk. They're not wrong, since it's a matter of opinion, but our needs differ.

>Maybe he was genuinely on the spectrum and mistook structural divergence for compelling action
Maybe he didn't think that you need blood and sex every 10 pages to hold a reader's attention, which I'm getting the impression from with you. That things like character and cultural development are worthwhile things for their own sake.

>Jesus, the original was long enough. If the text themselves aren't interesting enough to justify their time sink, why would I go even further and go through his drafts on top of that to compare them? Dear god.
Because it's fascinating, and an incredibly good study in how to use words effectively.

>Let me ask you this: what can you get from an actual Tolkien text that you can't get faster and better, in 2017, from the Middle Earth Wiki?
The psychology, and for lack of a better word "class" of any given character, which is usually apparent from 1-2 lines of dialog. The ambiguity of power and evil. The question as to what sorts of values are actually worth holding onto in life or death struggles.

>Like I said his world was brilliant, but we live in a world where SOMEONE has already read it and made a Wiki out of it, and we live in a world where filler/padding text just takes time out of your life where you could be having fun
Show me a wiki article on the nature of evil and speculations thereof in a Tolkien wiki.

>Tolkien, and the Novel in general, are relics of his time.
You are an idiot, since none. Of. The. LoTR. Books. Are. Novels.

It;s not remotely apples to oranges. Gygax loved fantasy fiction and was explicit about the stories he saw as inspiration for his game.

>You are an idiot, since none. Of. The. LoTR. Books. Are. Novels.

Ok but you've got to actually explain where you're coming from with this.

>What's your definition?
Of a Novel? A fictitious prose narrative with a clearly defined protagonist whose psychological study defines the work; the climax intersecting with the fulfillment of that character's potential and the reader's understanding of it.

So for instance, Joyce's Eveline is a novel, even though it's 6 pages long. To shift over to something more resembling Tolkien: Don Quixhote is a novel. Le Morte De Artur is not.

If you're asking as to the definition of LoTR's genre, it's either a romance or a mythological text, depending on how you take the frame tale.

>Have you tried the Cat in the Hat?
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I thought The Cat in the Hat was terrible. There's absolutely no explanation given for how a feline biped like that could have evolved alongside Homo sapiens. Convergent evolution is one thing, but The Cat in the Hat pushes it way beyond the realm of credibility. (And don't even get me started on the hat.) Also, I'm not sure if you noticed, but the author's vocabulary seems to be severely limited.

See
Novels, by definition, have central protagonists whose mental states, and the unriddling of such, are the primary arc the narrative is asking you to grapple with. The closest thing you get to that is Frodo, and while he does have considerable character development over the course of the work, his mental state is not critical to it. The War of the Ring and the Hobbits shaking the world to its foundations aren't hinged upon Frodo realizing that he can no longer function due to the stress of the adventure he so impetuously agreed to.

It's (if you believe the tale at face value and we don't go into frame tale stuff) a chivalric romance, which is a completely different genre.

I dunno the way a lot of LOTR is written make it one of the comfiest adventures ever made.

No, that's not at all what it was. How could you possibly come think that's what it was?

Well that's not the common usage of the word in English and you just look like a jackass by trying to be pedantic about it.

I enjoyed them, and I've read them multiple times through in my life, most of those times being when I was a child.

But then again I'm also the sort of person who adores the Waterloo chapter of Les Misérables, so I suppose I'm just the kind of autist who enjoys tedium and excruciating detail.

Thank you for writing this. I just didn't have it in me to tell another fucking millennial that maybe people had a different idea of what qualified as a good book in an entirely different age, where people had more spare time and a lot of them spent a lot of it reading fucktons of books.

>Well that's not the common usage of the word in English
It is, however, the usual use of the word in a literary environment. And since we're discussing a work of literature here, it is apropos. What's next? Telling astronomers they're wrong when they call Carbon a metal in spectroscopic graphs?

These are the first half dozen results I get when I type "define novel" into google:

>a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism.

>an invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals especially with human experience through a usually connected sequence of events

>a long, printed story about imaginary characters and events:
literary/romance novels

>A novel is any relatively long, written work of narrative fiction, normally in prose, and typically published as a book.

>A fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters.

>an extended fictional work in prose; usually in the form of a story