In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.” If there had been music… but no, of course there was no music. If there had been travelers stirring in their rooms they would have stretched and grumbled the silence away like fraying, half-forgotten dreams. Thunder would have muttered and rumbled and chased the silence down the road like fallen autumn leaves. If there had been a storm, raindrops would have tapped and pattered against the selas vines behind the inn. The most obvious part was a vast, echoing quiet made by things that were lacking.

“Dawn was coming, the Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

Here, for example, is a chunk from the prologue of Kingkiller Chronicle Book 2, The Wise Man’s Fear: So what’s Rothfuss’ writing like? Verbose, heavy on the imagery and prone to elaborate metaphor. If you think you can ape the style Rothfuss deploys in the Kingkiller Chronicle, you can try your hand at 300 “Bad Rothfuss” words and submit them using a Google form on his blog. Rothfuss was inspired by a segment on public radio show Wits, in which Neil Gaiman read aloud selections from their “Bad Gaiman Challenge.” The on-the-nose spoofs of Gaiman’s distinctive style tickled Rothfuss ( as it seemed to tickle the audience in this video), who asked, in a new blog post, “could we do something like this, but for my writing?” And thus the “Bad Rothfuss Challenge” was born. Fantasy writer Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man’s Fear and the upcoming Book 3 in his Kingkiller Chronicle, The Doors of Stone, wants you to write poorly.

The kingkiller chronicle doors of stone