The first paragraph is possibly the most important place in the entire series, and Brooks uses it just to set the scene. The trail stretched out unevenly down the northern slope, winding through the huge boulders which… The sun was already sinking into the deep green of the hills to the west of the valley, the red and gray-pink of its shadows touching the corners of the land, when Flick Ohmsford began his descent. Open Your Story With Something Interesting So I’ll go through it for you, critiquing it and occasionally comparing it to Lord of the Rings. Luckily for us, it’s bad in ways fiction writers can learn from. Whether it’s because Brooks was still inexperienced when he wrote the first chapter of the first book, or simply because it was written in the 70s when standards were different (and probably lower), the writing is surprisingly bad. Naturally, I decided to read it – or try to. I was warned it’s a Lord of the Rings copycat, but I knew nothing about the story or any of its characters. Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara is a fantasy classic.
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