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http://bit.ly/2Vg9Z4WSo I had these impassioned rants about how important it is for a writer to fully understand everything in their stories so they can describe it vividly, and people all agreed with me, but now I feel like a hypocrite because I literally just published a whole fanfic where I decided I didn’t care about the Big Pivotal Event and so I just– didn’t describe it.
(In this case: a wedding. As a never-married person, sometimes wedding fics actually squick me, like genuine upset discomfort, and I don’t totally know why or really care to explore it that much most of the time? So I’ve written them before, but in this one, I just… did not want to. no interest. none whatsoever. boring, who the fuck cares. But it had to happen, it was kind of the major thing in the timeline, and I very much wanted to write what happened before and after, so…)
I deliberately put it in the POV of someone who would be distracted and confused and would know the general idea of what was going on enough to not need to pay attention to or follow them. So she just didn’t, and it was all a blur of vague impressions, from the last thing I cared about until the next thing I cared about.
Was that lazy storytelling? Maybe! Would I do it in pro fic? … You know, I might. Hear me out:
You don’t have to describe things, and it doesn’t make it Bad Writing if you opt out. Think, for example, of Mad Max: Fury Road. There was so much rape in that universe, and they showed not one single snippet of it. They didn’t have to; they showed the reactions, they showed the scars, they showed the anger, they showed the social damage it had done. And that was honestly the better storytelling decision, removing any of the shock or potential guilty titillation or anything that distracted from the real story, which was the damage done and how the survivors were making it stop.
You can do this with all kinds of things. Pay attention to your own interests, is the point that I really should have been making all along. If you are just not interested in a thing that’s supposed to happen in your story, you don’t have to tell it. It really, really helps if you do research the things you want to include, was the other component of my point– I was being smug that I happen to have already researched so many things that are useful to my writing, but think of it this way– I’m writing things that are relevant to my interests, and I have researched these things because they are my interests.
Write what you know is both good and bad advice, like all advice– and the point I meant to make, and really didn’t, is that it both behooves someone who wants to create to cast their net of interests widely and learn about everything they can, and to pursue those interests in their art. If you are not interested in swordplay then don’t write it, and there are thousands or even millions of ways you can take that– from worldbuilding to just not have swords, to letting your POV characters share your disinterest, to like MM:FR showing the effects of it without describing the actual action parts– you’ll have to use your judgement and maybe you’ll have to still do a little research to talk around it intelligently, but you don’t have to go join a salle and get stabbed for this if you don’t want to.
(I mean, duh, nobody ever has to do a thing because some preachy half-baked Hot Take on the Internet told them to; I am speaking from a place of Zero authority, but it’s worth pointing out.)
Some stuff is going to be inescapable, but understand too, you don’t have to be Interested In Fashion to just look up how clothing works in various societies and get some vague descriptions under your belt of how many layers a character is likely to have on and whether the laundry is going to be a big deal or not (and if not, why not). You can get away with just researching enough to handwave why you don’t care to talk about it. You do not need to construct an entire language for your made-up world if you don’t want to. You don’t have to take up spinning or even read a book about spinning. You don’t have to watch YouTube videos about guns if you don’t like guns.
You can follow your own interests. You can listen to your own discomfort. You can trust yourself, and separate “laziness” from “this is not necessary to my story and my brain is resisting it”. (You will know. You will know! You will know. Eventually. Trust yourself, and let yourself figure it out.) (Like for example, you’re writing a scene and it’s coming out super vague and you don’t like it? You probably need to know more stuff first. You’re writing a scene and it’s not going the direction you want it to? Probably you’re pushing against your natural inclinations and you gotta step back; it might be narrative issues but it might be a fault in the setting. You just gotta try stuff, and it’s not always procrastinating to go read a book about weaving or something. Sometimes you just gotta fertilize that mental garden, work in some compost or something. Research stuff when you want to. Follow the things you’re actually interested in. Don’t infodump. But you knew that, you’ve already read the Turkey City Lexicon.)
You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. You might have to do stuff you find difficult, but the art you make can be made out of the stuff you’re into, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
It’s just super handy when you spent your whole youth pursuing hobbies that wind up relevant to basically every fantasy worldbuilding concept, was really what my initial point was supposed to be.
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