Pomegranates and Bats: Details in Revisions

[blairmacg]

Sand of Bone heads off to its editor and final reader tonight, so I'm taking a little break in order to let me brain think about something else for a bit.

I am not a structured worldbuilder. Before writing, I do not sit down to answer a hundred questions about culture, religion, navigation, textiles, government, livestock, gender relations, history

Comments

[elenbarathi]

I'm one of those persnickity readers who do give a damn if the bats are behaving correctly, and will bitch about it if they're not.

I like the 'Flying Snowmen' post and discussion; thanks! IMHO, the entire hot-lava scene in Jackson's RotK was red-hot flaming bullshit from start to finish anyway. I've been a hard-core Tolkien geek since 1973, and the last plank fell out of my Suspension Bridge of Disbelief when the wargs the size of SUVs attacked before Helm's Deep. Peter Jackson has NO frickin' clue; he's taken a classic of English literature and dumbed it down to a stupid comic book.

Note, however, that Tolkien had some 'Flying Snowmen' of his own. In The Hobbit, for instance, he has the Moon rising after dark and thus giving light for Bard the bowman to shoot Smaug, but it had been the New Moon that revealed the Secret Keyhole the night before. If one is going to make the precise phase of the Moon an important plot-point, it makes no sense at all to just throw that away for no reason - or rather, for the extremely sloppy reason that a rising Full Moon was convenient to the tale, but waiting two weeks for it was not.

Tolkien's sloppy about where the food comes from, too. Gildor Inglorion's fair apples and white bread, for instance - because the Wood Elves are renowned for their wheat fields and apple orchards, right? The Dwarves of Khazad-dum didn't produce their own food, but rather, traded with Men: yeah right, "Potatoes, 1 bushel, 5 gold pieces."

Of course, all that sort of thing is small potatoes compared to Peter Jackson's blatantly violating all the laws of both physics and physiology whenever he feels like it. One can't even care about the characters very much, because they get beat and battered and dropped off cliffs onto rock, and take no more damage from it than Wiley Coyote would.

In general, I would say that the more fantastical elements one wants the reader to accept, the more careful one has to be to get the non-fantastical elements right. I can accept a dragon; I can accept a talking bird; I can even accept a talking bird that turns into a dragon, but there's no possible way I can accept a Full Moon two days after a New Moon. It's like having sunrise two hours after sunset, like they did in The Truman Show.

[blairmacg]

In general, I would say that the more fantastical elements one wants the reader to accept, the more careful one has to be to get the non-fantastical elements right.

That's it in a nutshell, yes.

As a reader, I'm pretty forgiving if the writer has led me to care about the characters, and I can let quite a few things pass. The errors have to be pretty big and basic (yeah, the moon thing bugs me) to pull me out of the story. Bats in the wrong place? I'll let the writer hand-wave. A non-enhanced human beat half to death, then fighting at full capacity the next day? Nope.