operationalize things
show, don't tell
now, sometimes tell. but the limit i've discovered is one to one.5 sentences.
i may be wrong, or a d1ck -- but i am definitely not trying to be cute or contrary.
rule: if you're telling for more than, say, 1.5 sentences -- cut. it means you've fucked up, and are actively fucking up. you are actively and knowingly wronging the reader: her attention and time, and your esteem for her as your Reader.
it is incredible how consistently this is true. Truedeath passage. show them both! do it ! do it! share !
you don't get to do your dumb "world building" bullshit. world-building is not writing -- PLEASE don't tell me a thing that i know which is that writing is whatever, i know that, okay you want it another way:
"world building" is masturbatory, sophomoric 'writing'
world-building is for you. now, there will be some readers who are 'you', meaning who get so into your story or approaches stories in such a way that they want to delve into all the blah blah blah
but THAT IS NOT MOST PEOPLE.
and i don't mean "that is not most people" in the sense of 'most people don't read most books; even books that get read by lots lots lots of people don't get read by most people' etc.
i mean that the relationship to story that we practically all expect -- and this is, to be sure, culturally derived; but i'm using culture VERY broadly here -- is one in which...
world-building is for you.
i have...i'm not joking, i have a novel's worth of cut paragraphs, several paragraph exegeses, etc. of all the world-building shit. i'm not saying that makes me great at building worlds, i'm just saying it's true, and omigod if you don't think some reader and authors elide VOLUME with QUALITY in the world-building game then you have not read...just, yeah. certain authors.
and this is why it pisses me off, in a sense more than anything else
if someone writes prose in a particular way i do not like, as a reader, but they write prose in that way and it's tuned and it's crafted --> 0 bad
if someone just can't really write prose --> hold judgment; maybe they are a cynical assface who wants to tell things and make every one of us dumber...or, maybe they're just a person that i think 'can't really write prose'. both totally possible. hold judgment
some world building fucking guy (YES. USUALLY GUY) who is probably a guy probably my age by now (maybe a little older, but...maybe not!) fucking...
it is the direct result of a failure of an empathetic discipline that is at the heart of effectively conveying a story to other people, instead of putting words on paper ("paper". whatever. u know what i mean) because...I don't know. it feels good, to you, or something.
Valerian was a weird and-- whatever, this isn't a review of Valerian. But [a] [lot] [of] [critics] singled out its start as being pretty great, and that's because (a) okay yes the thing with the world that you see through the glasses and you're there but not there your ARM IS STILL THERE UHOH! and all that: very cool; (b) it did "world-building" in an exhilarating, even thrilling way -- you saw them acting and doing and moving through their world, being people in their world, and that's how the "world" got "built" i.e. just through showing story and action. Valerian provides a kind of interesting example in another way because this super-deft, absolutely streamlined (at least for much of the first act) introduction to the physical and social realities and technologies of this movie's world could be readily and immediately contrasted with the "shitty world-building" version of "character establishment", i.e. character conversations so expositional and on-the-nose you almost didn't know what to do with yourself, like if someone started to take off all their clothes on the bus you'd just...you'd get off, at the next stop? but before that? it was like oh my god. sorry digression the point is the world-building.
show, don't tell
now, sometimes tell. but the limit i've discovered is one to one.5 sentences.
i may be wrong, or a d1ck -- but i am definitely not trying to be cute or contrary.
rule: if you're telling for more than, say, 1.5 sentences -- cut. it means you've fucked up, and are actively fucking up. you are actively and knowingly wronging the reader: her attention and time, and your esteem for her as your Reader.
it is incredible how consistently this is true. Truedeath passage. show them both! do it ! do it! share !
The charm hovered, flickering on scree leading into the hills.
They approached.
A New Path is TrueDeath. Enter?
"O. Yes," someone said. (Who? Doesn't matter. Ninety minutes: dead.)
Emmy's eyes danced; her fingernail crescents got hot.
TrueDeath.
Reader, to be clear: Emmy ❤ed, ❥ed this game. Since the night she had Fallen and passed its weird test, her heart lived inside it. In Fehns, in Akkad.
TrueDeath.
Her fingers curled. Just finding a TD sparked knuckles electric. Shed of lore, here's what mattered: super-challenging Instances (dungeon, battle; it varied). Just a handful in-world. They popped up and vanished, no one knew where or why. There were theories, of course — based on datamined clues and metagame calisthenics novella-length headlore about...Reader, again, we've all seen it: there is no limit to how weird gamers get, stuff like this. Left to their own deft hypothesizations.
So yeah: even finding a TrueDeath was pretty exciting. But beating one? what then? what was the deal, huh?
? ? ? ?
No one knew.
No one'd beaten one yet.
Fehns ran in that cave like her feet were on fire.
F&ck "world building."you don't get to do your dumb "world building" bullshit. world-building is not writing -- PLEASE don't tell me a thing that i know which is that writing is whatever, i know that, okay you want it another way:
"world building" is masturbatory, sophomoric 'writing'
world-building is for you. now, there will be some readers who are 'you', meaning who get so into your story or approaches stories in such a way that they want to delve into all the blah blah blah
but THAT IS NOT MOST PEOPLE.
and i don't mean "that is not most people" in the sense of 'most people don't read most books; even books that get read by lots lots lots of people don't get read by most people' etc.
i mean that the relationship to story that we practically all expect -- and this is, to be sure, culturally derived; but i'm using culture VERY broadly here -- is one in which...
world-building is for you.
i have...i'm not joking, i have a novel's worth of cut paragraphs, several paragraph exegeses, etc. of all the world-building shit. i'm not saying that makes me great at building worlds, i'm just saying it's true, and omigod if you don't think some reader and authors elide VOLUME with QUALITY in the world-building game then you have not read...just, yeah. certain authors.
and this is why it pisses me off, in a sense more than anything else
if someone writes prose in a particular way i do not like, as a reader, but they write prose in that way and it's tuned and it's crafted --> 0 bad
if someone just can't really write prose --> hold judgment; maybe they are a cynical assface who wants to tell things and make every one of us dumber...or, maybe they're just a person that i think 'can't really write prose'. both totally possible. hold judgment
some world building fucking guy (YES. USUALLY GUY) who is probably a guy probably my age by now (maybe a little older, but...maybe not!) fucking...
it is the direct result of a failure of an empathetic discipline that is at the heart of effectively conveying a story to other people, instead of putting words on paper ("paper". whatever. u know what i mean) because...I don't know. it feels good, to you, or something.
Valerian was a weird and-- whatever, this isn't a review of Valerian. But [a] [lot] [of] [critics] singled out its start as being pretty great, and that's because (a) okay yes the thing with the world that you see through the glasses and you're there but not there your ARM IS STILL THERE UHOH! and all that: very cool; (b) it did "world-building" in an exhilarating, even thrilling way -- you saw them acting and doing and moving through their world, being people in their world, and that's how the "world" got "built" i.e. just through showing story and action. Valerian provides a kind of interesting example in another way because this super-deft, absolutely streamlined (at least for much of the first act) introduction to the physical and social realities and technologies of this movie's world could be readily and immediately contrasted with the "shitty world-building" version of "character establishment", i.e. character conversations so expositional and on-the-nose you almost didn't know what to do with yourself, like if someone started to take off all their clothes on the bus you'd just...you'd get off, at the next stop? but before that? it was like oh my god. sorry digression the point is the world-building.