no one knows what it's like to be the bad man

[hth_the_first]

So this is just a little snippity thing for a friend of mine, involving a character that I'd like to get around to writing one of these days. Enjoy it for whatever it's worth.

Comments

[palebluebell]

Please excuse lateness, I haven't quite got the hang of not missing important things in my friendlist-thing.

I read this before seeing your argument for why it should be science fiction - but I thought, exactly as you did, how could it possibly be anything but.

I've been told that the main thing an introduction should achieve is to entice the reader to be interested enough to keep reading. That being so - you got there, because I would have read more if there'd been more to read.

As far as the details of setting - well, there's only so much detail a small piece can hold. As far as understanding what's going on, unless you begin to draw comparisons - this world is different from where we live now because of - which would be awful, then you just have to put it in a way that the character understands it. I'm not making sense, but I just mean that he's not looking around in those few paragraphs mulling over the differences in housing and living conditions between his time and our time, he's thinking about the change in himself. To provide too much detail on his home would be to begin 'telling' rather than showing. It would also detract from the focus of the thing - which to me was the infinitely interesting and complicated issue of being changed from one person to another and being *aware* of those changes - and you caught me like a fly in sap with that idea.