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[sartorias]

Up in beautiful Mariposa for a writing retreat. Much progress so far, and yesterday even woke up to RAIN! Very brief--it was gone by six--but hey, it's a first for the year.

Some rambling thoughts on the writer-reader contract.

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Comments

[whswhs]

Curiously, I was just in a discussion with starshipcat that touched on this.

S.M. Stirling wrote two novels, The Sky People and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, that deliberately evoked the Lowellian solar system as portrayed, for example, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The first, set on a wet, warm Venus with dinosaurs and tribal peoples, I found no more than tolerable. But the second, set on an ancient, highly civilized Mars with advanced bioscience, a caste-based planetary empire, and canals, I enjoyed a lot, both for its bits of humor (the Rodents of Unusual Size were about the size of shrews, and equally voracious) and for its elaborate worldbuilding

[sartorias]

Indeed, that's right in there among the many strands that can make up that "contract."

[starshipcat]

And it reminds us that there is no "perfectly spherical reader of uniform density" (to play on an old physics joke) and what may appeal to one person is exactly what turns off another. Which is why it's good to have several beta readers, because having just one can lead to one's writing being skewed to that person's tastes strongly enough that it doesn't appeal to anyone else.

[sartorias]

Very true on all counts!

[whswhs]

Heh. I used "Consider a spherical cow" as a displayed quotation in one of my recent GURPS books. . . .