Speaking of starting at the beginning… what is MOOCs?
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(more seriously, I’m guessing it’s related to:
)
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Well, at least with your reading background you wouldn’t fall for the other one: confused by my character talking about a war and learning that it was the 20’s, not the late 40’s. And one person (when I clarified) said I should have said WWI. As if the characters knew that there’d be another one within a decade. So I know I need to work on the setting, but it was the assumption that it could only be post II that got me. Jazz and seances could obviously not have been earlier. (People should learn SOMETHING about history before… Well, in my opinion it’s just a good idea anyway. :-P)
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To be honest I’m with you leaving the tag off often makes the transistion from dialogue to action flow more organically.
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I don’t feel the need to be clued into everything. However, I do expect to be clued in if it becomes relevant. There’s a difference between mentioning the relevant and then expanding later, and deliberate obfuscation.
As an example:
If your book opens on a chase scene, and you’re running from the Three Letter Agency, I don’t immediately need to know what you did. I don’t immediately need to know what the TLA’s mandate is. I don’t immediately need to know how many of them there are, or how many partners you have, or anything that isn’t relevant to the fact that you’re running from them. What I do need to know are things like: Do you expect them to be able to catch you? What are the consequences for not escaping? Did you do whatever it is they’re chasing you for? Do you know why they’re chasing you? At this point, is it a faceless agency after you, or is it someone you know leading the chase?
I need to be able to put myself in the character’s head. I don’t need the full story, because the full story isn’t going through the character’s head at any given moment. But I do need to know what the character thinks is relevant in that moment.
For a recent example of a story that fails at this, I’ll point to the first chapter of Walkaway (of which, admittedly, I have only read the first two chapters).
The main character is at a party. There is no apprehension felt in terms of any sort of raid. Then, out of nowhere, there is a raid by drones. The characters don masks (unmentioned to this point), and then a secondary character starts listing off a set of consequences that might happen to them if the secondary character gets caught. The main character doesn’t react, except to hit the secondary character to shut him up. Another secondary character gets seriously injured in the raid. The main character helps the injured secondary character and then escapes with a few other characters.
What I should know at this point:
- It’s clearly not entirely unexpected that the party got raided, but how expected is it?
- What does the POV character fear will happen if they get caught? How well does it match up with the second character’s list?
- For the serious injury: how often does that kind of injury happen in this kind of raid?
- Do they expect to be able to escape? Have they thought the idea of escape through before this: if so, what did they think?
Little touches are all that are needed: Maybe earlier in the scene, someone hears a buzzing noise and goes for their mask, and then realizes that it’s just an insect. For the injury: “It happened all the time, but it wasn’t supposed to be someone he knew” gives a much different vibe than “The media were going to have a field day when they found out a kid had died in the raid.” Stuff like that. But if you don’t tell me that, how am I supposed to relate to what the character is going through?
So, going back to your example:
“Alice could have told him I was terrible at flirting.” — If that’s the last mention of Alice for awhile, my problem with it would be that it doesn’t resolve the thought. Your character is thinking about whoever Alice is, which is a diversion away from what she should be thinking about. If it’s then immediately back to business, then that train of thought just vanished.
Rather than @zfirphdn’s solution, I’d go with something like.
Alice could have told him I was terrible at flirting. How I had ever managed… No, there was time for reminiscing later.
Or:
Alice could have told him I was terrible at flirting. In fact, I had…
The man was looking at me oddly, and I realized my mind had been wandering down that well-worn path named “Unsuccessful attempts at having a love life.”
Or:
Alice could have told him I was terrible at flirting. And then she would have told me to focus on the mission at hand.
Like @zfirphdn’s suggestions, each of those tells us something different about who Alice is, a minimal amount of which is necessary to let us know what kind of headspace the character is in when the thought goes through her head. However, they each also resolve the thought-at-hand and bring us back to the narrative.
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Maybe refer to it as the great war?
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You know that he probably felt this disturbance in the force, and now he’s killed off another character we all like again! Thanks!!!
The way that universities in the future are going to replace your friendly neighborhood history professor with one guy from MIT? 
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Noooooo! Not Hot Pie!
Say it ain’t so, George! Say it ain’t so!
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I don’t think in the face of that kind of thinking that even that would be enough. I have actually encountered that mindset before, and sometimes people just cannot grasp the POV of someone in history. We’ve given these events certain designations and for some people, that is the only designation the event has ever had.
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I agree with you. Creative writing is not the same thing as a newspaper article.
Sounds like your critics are not actually trained in literary criticism.
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More like, they’ll replace our friendly neighborhood history professor with a book written by someone from MIT, and class will be a bunch of amateurs, dilettantes, and blowhards debating the finer points of the book and determining their correctness.
Careful, this is how religions get started
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No, no, no… that’s just grad school!
But seriously, it’s probably not going to be a bunch of moocs as the money for humanities dries up, but it’s going to be people like me most likely winding up in lecutring or adjuncting positions or ending up at non-profits, government positions, think tanks, or corporate historian jobs, with ivy league graduates getting the ever narrowing circle of tenure track humanities jobs where they get to pursue their research (meaning far less poc or working class people breaking into researching humanities topics). Just less money for things like a greater public understanding of history, art, or literature in general being the end result. The people who have the time/energy to take a mooc for their own edification are the people who will already be able to afford a well-rounded college education (and have it, and also have a high level of literacy) to begin with and don’t necessarily need to learn these things…
Sorry… that turned into a rant. My bad!
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It’s never something I ever consciously say to myself while reading but I often accept that a new and not fully introduced character is eventually going to get the background information I need, as long as they’re important to the story.
This seems to be especially true of short fiction where the aim is to get things moving, but I also find it happens sometimes in stand-alone novels. The ones that come to mind are those of Diana Wynne Jones which I feel tend to drop the reader into the deep end of the pool on page one.
And I don’t mean that as a criticism. There’s a real thrill in that temporary disorientation, and I also feel it’s a compliment to the reader, as though she’s saying, “You’re smart enough to figure this out.”
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Blowhards and suckups, definitely, but not a dilettante in sight!
Absolutely.
I’m anticipating a nationwide brain drain.
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Sadly, the damage from a lack of Arts/Humanities education is more subtle than the trades-shortage. Arts /Humanities teach us how to deal with ambiguity, how to ask questions, and generally, how to actually think. By the time people figure out that there is a serious shortage of people who can properly think and assess without clear answers (or, in some cases without all the information) we shall be well and truly fucked. And that’s IF there’s enough people left capable of critically assessing what the problem is. 1984 is going to look like a Disneyfied fairytale. With minorities taking it on the chin the entire way.
Cynical? I guess I learned that in Arts education.
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Ah moron got it.
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I wouldn’t say that. In a lot of cases it’s all they ever learned, and the longer you “know” something, the harder it is to shake.
It also ties in with my reply above about Arts education. The more (especially fiction, especially books or audiobooks that require more of an imagination ) you are exposed to when young, the better you get at slipping into someone else’s POV. If you haven’t had that exposure and practice, it’s hard to develop as an adult.
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True. Still a sad state of affairs though.
This used to be the point of the classic “liberal education”: not to learn all there was to learn, but to learn how to learn, keep learning, think critically, and understand your world. Now high school is often daycare with sports, and college is vocational school.
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Well, it appears some people don’t believe us: https://twitter.com/seananmcguire/status/849003527020138496
I forsee Seanan winning this, though.
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