God, I love your book reviews XD. So many things I keep thinking I'll have to keep in mind next I write a story and "oh-fuck-have-I-thought-about-that-until-now?" or "how-am-I-going-to-measure-whether-or-not-my-plot-is-shit?"
I find the best thing to keep in mind when writing/worldbuilding is to just constantly ask yourself 'why'. Not why you're doing it, but why the things/situations in the story are there, or happening, or why they came to be, or if it's fantasy/sci-fi then why the aspects of the culture/race/whatever are they way they are, what influenced the society or the evolution into its current state. It's a very useful exercise, I've found. :)
So very true ! I took a design class in my last year of studies, where one of the exploration methods (to understand why people you design for do the things they do) are the "five why's". Basically, it's the notion that asking five times why to an answer a people gives you is enough to reach the fundamental character traight or reason why they do things (and then you outbranch to find another solution to their problem than the obvious, like a car instead of "a faster horse"). And I've found indeed that for characters, it allows to make sure if what the character is doing is actually coherent with his fundamental drives, and the other way around, become conscious of what the driving forces are in a character that you unconsciously move around. That being said, it's still uber hard to force yourself to constantly think about it. I tip my hat to you madam for managing to do that.
(I find it actually fascinating how what I learned in product design could be applied to so many domains.)
Ah yeah, that's cool when that kind of thing is applicable elsewhere!
I try and think about it a lot, and I've certainly gotten better, although sometimes I think it gets left out of the story itself. I can answer 'why' for pretty much anything in any of my created worlds, it's just a question of whether or not I actually got the story itself to give that answer clearly. That's what rewrites are for though, ahah. :)
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So many things I keep thinking I'll have to keep in mind next I write a story and "oh-fuck-have-I-thought-about-that-until-now?" or "how-am-I-going-to-measure-whether-or-not-my-plot-is-shit?"
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I find the best thing to keep in mind when writing/worldbuilding is to just constantly ask yourself 'why'. Not why you're doing it, but why the things/situations in the story are there, or happening, or why they came to be, or if it's fantasy/sci-fi then why the aspects of the culture/race/whatever are they way they are, what influenced the society or the evolution into its current state. It's a very useful exercise, I've found. :)
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I took a design class in my last year of studies, where one of the exploration methods (to understand why people you design for do the things they do) are the "five why's". Basically, it's the notion that asking five times why to an answer a people gives you is enough to reach the fundamental character traight or reason why they do things (and then you outbranch to find another solution to their problem than the obvious, like a car instead of "a faster horse"). And I've found indeed that for characters, it allows to make sure if what the character is doing is actually coherent with his fundamental drives, and the other way around, become conscious of what the driving forces are in a character that you unconsciously move around. That being said, it's still uber hard to force yourself to constantly think about it. I tip my hat to you madam for managing to do that.
(I find it actually fascinating how what I learned in product design could be applied to so many domains.)
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I try and think about it a lot, and I've certainly gotten better, although sometimes I think it gets left out of the story itself. I can answer 'why' for pretty much anything in any of my created worlds, it's just a question of whether or not I actually got the story itself to give that answer clearly. That's what rewrites are for though, ahah. :)
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(BTW, you probably don't want to read Dhalgren; it'll most likely piss you off.)
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