Speculative Fiction vs. everything else
Originally called "Genre vs. Non-Genre" but everything has a genre, so really, it's about speculative fiction vs. things that aren't. Other genres have their own quirks.
But you know what? That assembling-a-story-from-clues is something I always do. I do that all the time, because the mainstream culture doesn't make a whole terrible lot of sense to me. It's just another culture to me, tossed in with the billionty other cultures I've observed over various lives. I have a lot of knowledge stored, but it's fluid rather than static. I tend to derive rather than assume. That gives me a totally different perspective than what most people have.
So yes, I write the same way, little flicks of data, small concrete details that indicate what of importance is happening in a story. It doesn't particularly matter whether I'm writing about aliens, which I do often, or ordinary people in an ordinary world, which I do rarely. It's always written with those mapping-points so people can figure out which world they're in and what's going on there.
I don't read much mundane fiction because it's almost never worth the assembly process. Like putting together a puzzle of a blank wall. And I often feel the same way about the mainstream culture in general, which is why I'm far more intrigued by practical nonfiction, or nature, or something like that. If all I'm going to get is a picture of someone's inane sex life or workplace grumbles, I might as well go watch paint dry.
Meanwhile, my favorite authors are turning people into cats, arranging for humans and vampires to live together, and generally bending reality into fascinating new shapes. Now those are worth putting the puzzle together for.
But you know what? That assembling-a-story-from-clues is something I always do. I do that all the time, because the mainstream culture doesn't make a whole terrible lot of sense to me. It's just another culture to me, tossed in with the billionty other cultures I've observed over various lives. I have a lot of knowledge stored, but it's fluid rather than static. I tend to derive rather than assume. That gives me a totally different perspective than what most people have.
So yes, I write the same way, little flicks of data, small concrete details that indicate what of importance is happening in a story. It doesn't particularly matter whether I'm writing about aliens, which I do often, or ordinary people in an ordinary world, which I do rarely. It's always written with those mapping-points so people can figure out which world they're in and what's going on there.
I don't read much mundane fiction because it's almost never worth the assembly process. Like putting together a puzzle of a blank wall. And I often feel the same way about the mainstream culture in general, which is why I'm far more intrigued by practical nonfiction, or nature, or something like that. If all I'm going to get is a picture of someone's inane sex life or workplace grumbles, I might as well go watch paint dry.
Meanwhile, my favorite authors are turning people into cats, arranging for humans and vampires to live together, and generally bending reality into fascinating new shapes. Now those are worth putting the puzzle together for.