McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Pacing of information in a fictional world
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: meh on June 15, 2010, 06:32:41 PM ---And the beholder is the FPN, whose intuition is strictly bounded by your characterization.
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To an extent. I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me that a lot of things that seem intutive to me personally are not intuitive to many other people, and writing a character to whom things are intutitive which leave non-me readers going "huh ? How the heck did she just conclude X from Y ?" is a failure mode that worries me.
--- Quote ---For my own part, lumping things as post and prior to a great Crash/Cataclysm/MomentOfGreatRevelation helps. Only have the character explain tech and social conventions to that point. Multiple such events, of different significance to cultures within your world? Even better: you can have your FPOV attempt to synchronize them, just as Thucydides had to do for the various calendars of various Greek cities and tribes.
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I am, at this point trying to sort out all the information I have for the relevant setting so that I'm not overloading it, and just focus on a couple of the cool bits for the first story. Series are marketable, right ?
meh:
--- Quote from: neurovore on June 15, 2010, 06:40:06 PM ---...
--- Quote ---For my own part, lumping things as post and prior to a great Crash/Cataclysm/MomentOfGreatRevelation helps. Only have the character explain tech and social conventions to that point. Multiple such events, of different significance to cultures within your world? Even better: you can have your FPOV attempt to synchronize them, just as Thucydides had to do for the various calendars of various Greek cities and tribes.
--- End quote ---
I am, at this point trying to sort out all the information I have for the relevant setting so that I'm not overloading it, and just focus on a couple of the cool bits for the first story. Series are marketable, right ?
--- End quote ---
I am trying to simplify things for you here: your character need only explain things to that all-changing event.
"Since the Great War no one had seen a technomage"
Aakaakaak:
--- Quote from: neurovore on June 15, 2010, 06:40:06 PM ---Series are marketable, right ?
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If you go by how Jim states he got published...they're almost mandatory.
prophet224:
Ok, I think this is a great question, and it is a problem that everyone in sci-fi or fantasy has to deal with to some extent. If you are in the far future or distant anywhere, you have that much more to explain. So don't.
Seriously. Look, you don't have to explain everything in great detail. Maybe there was a 'Great War' recently. Have a character mention his or her 'time in the Big One'. You don't have to go into details, but if you want to later, you can. The reader now knows that these people have somewhat recently dealt with a large-scale war, and all that entails.
Maybe you have some new technologies, say an Alcubierre-based gravity warping drive. Do you need to explain that in 2340 they were able to tap into quantum energy, which allowed both power and an alternate method for creating the gravity warping than dark matter? Nope. Explain that so-and-so drive was developed in <insert year>, warps space, and allows FTL speeds within relativity by moving the frame of reference. Minimal details. Tell what it does.
From a social standpoint, have them think whatever they think, based on their situation. Sometimes it is better to leave the question mark there. If Joe talks about something that seems unusual to us today, and the other characters appear to take it in stride, the reader will generally go "I wonder what that is all about" and give you space. You can then use a reflective scene to bring out more of the history.
On a side note, think about the movie 300. Those events occurred in 480B.C. A thousand years from now, do you think there will be entertainment centered around key battles from our time's world wars, for instance? You betcha. Use that sort of thing to draw compairsons. Just a thought.
That's just my thought.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: prophet224 on June 15, 2010, 07:29:23 PM ---Ok, I think this is a great question, and it is a problem that everyone in sci-fi or fantasy has to deal with to some extent. If you are in the far future or distant anywhere, you have that much more to explain. So don't.
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I know one does not have to explain everything, but there's only so much I can leave unexplained; the failure mode there is "A happens for unexplained reason, and then B follows on from A for reasons also unexplained, and then C comes on from that where a contemporary reader would most likely expect D to happen instead", and unless enough of the How Things Work basics are in there somewhere, it just looks like pulling plot from thin air rather than playing fair with the rules of that setting. I mean, a detective story where one met all the characters and then had the detective present the solution but never got the reasoning between the data and the solution would be at best gimmicky and at worst pointless.
--- Quote --- Nope. Explain that so-and-so drive was developed in <insert year>, warps space, and allows FTL speeds within relativity by moving the frame of reference. Minimal details. Tell what it does.
--- End quote ---
There's also a general-feel question here. Yes, there is made-up future science in it, but I want a solidity to it, and too much just describing what it does can end up feeling like "the ship is driven by a combination of plot contrivance and invisible pink unicorns." (This is not _Star Wars_, in which one can substitute "the Plot" for "the Force" throughout.)
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