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

[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.

[queenoftheskies]

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that most of the nit-picking goes on with science fiction and historical fiction of various kinds. (Once again, I could be wrong there.)

I think details like the one you mentioned add depth to the story without throwing in so much detail that the reader gets bogged down. I have to stop reading books that, to me, are over-written with more detail than story.

I'm so happy for you! How exiting that you're so close to publishing! This is such a great novel!

[blairmacg]

I think the nitpicking depends on the reader more than the genre. The difference between fantasy and SF, I think, is that there are actually fewer readers who understand pre-industrial life than *believe* they understand science. It never occurs to most folks to think about seasonal food availability, the time involved in clothing construction, or the effort and organization it takes to travel twenty miles on foot!

And details can indeed overwhelm. I think of them as parts of a tapestry. I want the entire picture to look awesome and complex. I don't want the first reaction to be, "Too much red thread!" :)

[elenbarathi]

"there are actually fewer readers who understand pre-industrial life than *believe* they understand science."

Except SCAdians, and even in the SCA, there's a tendency to think "Hey, this stuff's not so hard." Well, no, it's not, when one can choose when and how much to do it, and doesn't have to do ALL The Things all the time, come winter, come war-time, come plague, famine, tyranny, pregnancy. Fine to deal with our well-fed, well-sheltered, veterinary-attended modern horses with their professionally-made tack, but those are not the horses of the pre-industrial age

[blairmacg]

Most folks would have trouble walking 20 miles today, though, let alone knowing what they'd need (and not need) to bring. There isn't much of a frame of reference.

And it's indeed *very* different to live pre-industrial for a weekend than for lifetime. The practicalities of food acquisition and storage alone is daunting, and takes far more skill and effort than most imagine. Every natural disaster demonstrates how little thought most put into it.

(Digression: I'm a staunch believer in the responsibility able folks have to be prepared for emergencies, thus allowing limited resources to go to those who are unable to prepare.)

[green_knight]

I think there are two ways of breaking the suspension of disbelief. One is the flying snowman - which is just one detail too many; but the other are mundane details without context. And when the in-story context is missing, readers fall back on what they know about the real world.
(Personally, as a geographer, fluid lava just has me thinking of different lava types: while it is unlikely to coincide with the cone shape of Mount Doooooom, I've come across at least one volcano that changed the composition of its lava, so even that is not impossible.) If MtDoom had been the liquid outlet of evil miasmas in Middle Earth, of clearly magical origins, its viscosity would not have raised as many red flags with people

[blairmacg]

I like that notion of building better foundations, not just for the fantastical elements, but for the mundane ones as well. Sometimes we writers come up against what "everyone knows" to be true, but isn't true at all.

[green_knight]

I don't think 'facts' matter as much as that you've just sent your reader to Wikipedia. They might not emerge for hours...

And I think it's a fairly simple guideline: if this were a made-up fact, would it stand for itself or would it need explanation? The less likely something seems, the more support it wants, and rather than pulling readers out of the story or getting into an argument with them, this can be avoided.

This is part of the continuum where writers leave readers alone to build up an image of something - by simply saying 'field' for instance - and then creating backlash when it turns out the writer was thinking of a cornfield instead of a pasture, or vice versa. (It's perfectly possible to get this wrong in so many ways, of course, but I tend to like books where details are an integral part better than ones where they feel tacked on.)

[thanate]

Related rant: I read The Magicians and Mrs Quent probably upwards of a decade ago and at this remove the thing that I remember most clearly was that they had some kind of complex non-seasonal weather patterns that involved wildly variant day lengths and random instances of snow when you had too many short or nonexistant days together, and not only did the people keep something resembling a 24-hour schedule, but they had earth-type deciduous trees. I'm sorry, but oaks do not work under these conditions.

[blairmacg]

That's one heck of a missed worldbuilding opportunity! How cool it would have been had the consequences/adaptations of variant days and changeable weather been explored at all levels of the story!

[elenbarathi]

Now I'm sitting here trying to picture orbital parameters that would even allow for wildly variant day lengths without totally violating Newton's First Law of Motion. Would have to be a multi-sun system; the planet would probably have to be a lot bigger than Earth and a lot farther from its primaries, with a really wonky orbit.

Oaks would definitely not work.

[thanate]

My vague recollection is that there was something with eclipses and high satellite density that got between their planet and their sun(s), but I could be misremembering. There were accurate almanacs for what light to expect, but no mention that I recall of how in the world they managed to grow food.