Quote:
Originally Posted by Dodge
If every fiction writer and movie maker had to be a master of their project's genre we would have very few pieces of fiction entertainment. If facts are wanted then I would suggest documentaries.
We all have questions, even the experts.
|
Actually, that's almost of the definition of an expert. Experts ask (and find answers for) questions. Ignorant amateurs never ask questions; they make ignorant mistakes, and put mind-burningly stupid things in their books to afflict the rest of us. Smart amateurs fit somewhere in between.
I'd like to see more fiction writers and movie makers become, if not masters of their projects' genres, at least fundamentally aware of the basic facts and premises of those genres. "It's (fill in medium or genre here) so I can do as I like" doesn't cut it with me. If, for instance, we have futuristic space troopers making human wave attacks against enemies who have no long-range weaponry, rather than standing off and filling them full of holes/grenades/rockets/antimatter, I want to know why. It wouldn't make sense to a Marine today; why does it make sense for a Space Marine hundreds of years from now? If the answer is not provided (or if it's obvious that the answer is "because the filmmaker thought that's how it works" or "because he had this awesome enemy-eating-extra scene that he wanted to put in") that completely breaks the story for me.
In short, when you tell me something or show me something, it has to be consistent with what I know of the characters and the world -- and absent other knowledge, the default is reality. If something is inconsistent with reality, its presence must be logical, I must be aware of the logic, and the author must be aware of the ramifications of it. For example, if water flows uphill on alternate Tuesdays, that's going to affect everything from pouring buckets of water for horses to drink to whether tanneries' outflow is downstream or upstream of towns' water intakes (laws on where tanneries could locate were some of the first pollution control laws). Events and people don't exist in vacuums, and trying to pretend that they do produces fundamentally bad stories.
There was an excellent example in the old MMORPG Shadowbane. The developers created a quasi-medieval world, including walled towns which could be besieged, and expected the players, their function following the form, to behave like medieval warriors. The players, on the other hand, having been given de-facto phasers, cloaking devices, and transporters with magical names, used them accordingly, and our sieges bore no resemblance to their medieval counterparts; form followed function and we slipped invisibly into town, set up the summon chain to port in our friends, and nuked the living hades out of the place while the defenders sheltered on the walls. Someone, a lot of someones, didn't think hard about the situation. It appears that they believed that the trappings of the medieval world "just happened" and people adapted their behavior to conform with them (and expected us to do the same) rather than, as was the case, the outward appearance of the medieval world being a direct and inevitable effect of its technology, and, as we demonstrated, different technology would give totally different results.
Fiction not set in the modern, familiar world (SF, fantasy, historical fiction, etc.) is not, unlike what many amateurs believe, easier to write than its modern-realistic equivalent. It's harder. It's a lot harder. If you're writing something set in the present day, you and your readers all know everything they need about the fundamentals of society, its social interactions, and its technology. You don't have to explain much, if anything. For example, even if we personally don't own cell phones, we know how they work well enough to know that a phone has to be financially sound, has to be within range of a tower, and has to be contacting someone else with a viable phone of some type. We don't know that (and in the case of fantasy or SF,
can't know that) about telepathy, crystal balls, or town criers; the author has to sneak that information in somehow. We would never write a story where the reader says "why didn't she just call him?" when it's obvious she could have, since it's equally obvious to us as writers.
Picking on MMORPGs again, in World of Warcraft there is a quest where someone wants you to take a letter to a person who is less than two minutes' walk away and says it's too far for her to go, and they haven't been in touch in decades. There might be a million reasons why that person from the farm couldn't travel two minutes to the adjacent town (yes, it's so close that in the real world it would be
on the farm) but "it's too far" isn't one, and it rings false to the reader. It breaks the immersion, and makes us say "oh, that's just quest text; never mind what it says, just do it and get the experience points." We can deal with that in a game because, for most of us, it
is "just quest text" and it could say "take this widget to Foozle and collect 2,000 experience" and we wouldn't care; it's the game mechanics, in this case the exp, that matters. But in a book or movie, what matters is the story; if the story is no good, then nothing is, because that's all that's there.
How much you tell your readers about any given situation depends on the story, its tone, the author, and so on. But the reader should never ask the equivalent of "why didn't she just call him?" Not every reader will ask, of course, even mentally, but enough will to think poorly of the book and the author, and they'll tell their friends; even the ones who don't ask that question will feel there's something wrong, and won't think as positively about the story as they otherwise would have. Everyone who says "well, that was lame" is a lost customer for your next story, and everyone who hears it is a sale that will never happen for this one. If you're writing for yourself, that might not mean much. But most of us want other people to read what we write (and most of those want them to pay for it) and therefore it's our readers, not ourselves, whom we need to satisfy. So, yes, if we're writing a genre story, we'd better be masters of our genre. If we're not, there are bargain bins ready and waiting.