McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Induction into a hidden society
Paynesgrey:
--- Quote from: The Deposed King on May 05, 2012, 09:40:34 PM ---the dreaded info dumps are to be avoided if at all humanly possible.
the Deposed King
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I had a hard time dancing around how to avoid one of those. Ended up using a briefing, because in that setting that's exactly how the information would have realistically been disseminated to the other characters. Plus it gave me a chance to work in their voices and personalities, concerns and issues. But it's not something that'll work in every setting or be used too frequently.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Paynesgrey on May 07, 2012, 02:16:01 AM ---I had a hard time dancing around how to avoid one of those. Ended up using a briefing, because in that setting that's exactly how the information would have realistically been disseminated to the other characters. Plus it gave me a chance to work in their voices and personalities, concerns and issues. But it's not something that'll work in every setting or be used too frequently.
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I'm finding the great thing about a first-person narrator who is explicitly writing this stuff down is that a) she's keen to fill in the explanations and b) I can get a bunch of characterisation and worldbuilding in by the things she skips over as obvious to her, and the things she explains as totally weird to her and her assumed audience that a present-day reader will not think are weird at all. If anything, I'm having to restrain her a bit on that, but she can usually be diverted into how nowhere she goes ever makes a decent cup of coffee. (In the place she's in now, she complains that they serve it bitter, uncarbonated, and worst of all, hot. I think that sets up what her default expectation actually is better than pausing for three paragraphs to fill in the preceding 2300 years' history of coffee-drinking.)
Some bits of first-person stuff with the right narrator are so much easier than third person I'm surprised it's legal.
Snowleopard:
I did one story - and I need to find it again. Hopefully it didn't get thrown out
in the great move - where the protagonist is a news reporter - so the story is told from
her rather dry point of view and an info dump is, in essence, part of what she does.
Though I try not to do big info dumps. They'll just bore the socks off your readers.
Paynesgrey:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on May 07, 2012, 03:02:29 AM ---I'm finding the great thing about a first-person narrator who is explicitly writing this stuff down is that a) she's keen to fill in the explanations and b) I can get a bunch of characterisation and worldbuilding in by the things she skips over as obvious to her, and the things she explains as totally weird to her and her assumed audience that a present-day reader will not think are weird at all. If anything, I'm having to restrain her a bit on that, but she can usually be diverted into how nowhere she goes ever makes a decent cup of coffee. (In the place she's in now, she complains that they serve it bitter, uncarbonated, and worst of all, hot. I think that sets up what her default expectation actually is better than pausing for three paragraphs to fill in the preceding 2300 years' history of coffee-drinking.)
Some bits of first-person stuff with the right narrator are so much easier than third person I'm surprised it's legal.
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I can imagine. Haven't worked my way up to first person yet though. I'm still in the "learning exercise" part of the process. One thing I am having a great deal of fun doing is matching the language I use in the descriptions and such to the specific character who's the focus of the scene at the time, which seems to be an interesting method of demonstrating how they perceive and process things compared to other characters.
The Deposed King:
--- Quote from: Paynesgrey on May 07, 2012, 03:12:49 AM ---I can imagine. Haven't worked my way up to first person yet though. I'm still in the "learning exercise" part of the process. One thing I am having a great deal of fun doing is matching the language I use in the descriptions and such to the specific character who's the focus of the scene at the time, which seems to be an interesting method of demonstrating how they perceive and process things compared to other characters.
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Well I don't know that first person is increadibly hard. You just have to be a little in the guy/gal's head as you go along. For instance, with my Admiral Who, I just filtered most new experiences through Jason's paranoia or in some cases his feelings of superiority or inadequacy. Essentially he was always scheming.
You just have to remember to always be digressing after the dialogue, but at the same time it also has to be very much connected or else you wander too off the reservation.
The Deposed King
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