case: (Default)
Case ([personal profile] case) wrote in [community profile] fandomsecrets2015-11-15 04:07 pm

[ SECRET POST #3238 ]


⌈ Secret Post #3238 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 043 secrets from Secret Submission Post #463.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
ext_18500: My non-fandom OC Oraania. She's crazy. (Default)

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[identity profile] mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com 2015-11-16 03:08 pm (UTC)(link)
You're still going to Tolkien for your examples here. I already know his writing skimps on how the societies in the background work. The sort of story I am thinking of is something like David Eddings' writing, where he did make some attempt to indicate that the world the main characters were traveling through on their Great Quest had a working structure to it.

If the real issue is how much detail to realism there is, then maybe I can understand. I may like the passing nods to how the world works, but too many would distract from the story.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[personal profile] cbrachyrhynchos 2015-11-16 04:00 pm (UTC)(link)
The real issue is what does fantasy actually *do,* on scales ranging from the drabble to the multi-volume epic. What fantasy does is tell stories about the fantastic, usually by referencing other stories in the humanities. A ten-page feminist-horror retelling of The Little Mermaid doesn't need to discuss European colonialism or the mercantile system that created the ship.

I could dive into the implications of fairies and their reality distortion field on the operation of handheld computing which depends quite critically on key proofs developed by Turing and later mathematicians. But I'm not a computer scientist or a math specialist. So instead, I focus on retelling Tam Lin in a 21st century in a 21st century context with approximately 10,000 words incorporating my own understanding of emotional and sexual abuse, and let the non-euclidean geometry and resulting mathematics happen off-stage. Tam Lin is a story about rescuing one's lover from slavery and death after all.

ext_18500: My non-fandom OC Oraania. She's crazy. (Default)

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[identity profile] mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com 2015-11-16 05:40 pm (UTC)(link)

LOL, if it's not one extreme with you it's the other.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[personal profile] cbrachyrhynchos 2015-11-16 05:56 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm wondering what, exactly, do you think my argument is? As far as I'm aware, it's always been that the story comes first and everything around the story needs to be tuned to the demands of the story.

Does anyone really give a shit that Alexandre Dumas Pere played fast and loose with the biography of Abbe Faria, or that Shakespeare used two tourists to the Tudor court as patsies and drops the name of a post-Reformation university in Hamlet?

There's also a methodological argument here. History, economics, linguistics, and sociology are the Cinderella's stepsisters of fiction. You simply can't cram them into that glass slipper without cutting off toes.
Edited 2015-11-16 18:02 (UTC)
ext_18500: My non-fandom OC Oraania. She's crazy. (Default)

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[identity profile] mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com 2015-11-17 02:45 am (UTC)(link)
I gave up bothering to talk to you because you missed it when I said stories don't need excessive detail. Guess what! That was agreeing with some of what you've said! But it's clear to me you just want to be right in this argument, not that you really care about stories having background details or that those details make sense.

Go on your way.