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Nov. 5th, 2009 11:25 pmCower with fear. I'm about to do to you what writers who don't research properly do to their readers. Today was immensely important to me as a child. You get to work out why...
Quite a few friends will be happier when I stop teaching world-building. I love playing with the idea that we think we know far more than we actually know about people and their lives. All it takes is a writer forgetting that I wasn't born in the same year as them and my early life experiences were different and I find myself puzzling over the vague references in novels. Those vague references are supposed to be meaningful. Sometimes I work things out and sometimes I don't. I bet I do the same to readers when I write. It's inevitable in a way. Culture is relative and some relatives are more cultured than others (presumably through eating yoghourt)*.
Actually, all you have to know to work out why today was important to me as a child is to find out what November 5 meant in Melbourne in the 1960s. It's not that hard. Just that extra little bit of information makes a whacking great difference. Telling detail is everything.
Speaking of telling detail, I now have the right amount of detail about stockwhips. I just need to find the equivalent for battles in sheltered bays.
*My brain wanders today. I keep finding it and persuading it to stay home and then it wanders again. Peripatetic brains are worth their weight only in popcorn.
Quite a few friends will be happier when I stop teaching world-building. I love playing with the idea that we think we know far more than we actually know about people and their lives. All it takes is a writer forgetting that I wasn't born in the same year as them and my early life experiences were different and I find myself puzzling over the vague references in novels. Those vague references are supposed to be meaningful. Sometimes I work things out and sometimes I don't. I bet I do the same to readers when I write. It's inevitable in a way. Culture is relative and some relatives are more cultured than others (presumably through eating yoghourt)*.
Actually, all you have to know to work out why today was important to me as a child is to find out what November 5 meant in Melbourne in the 1960s. It's not that hard. Just that extra little bit of information makes a whacking great difference. Telling detail is everything.
Speaking of telling detail, I now have the right amount of detail about stockwhips. I just need to find the equivalent for battles in sheltered bays.
*My brain wanders today. I keep finding it and persuading it to stay home and then it wanders again. Peripatetic brains are worth their weight only in popcorn.