Thursday, January 31, 2013

Avoiding Literary Indigestion

If you've explored all the intricacies of your magic system on page one you're going to lose ninety percent of your audience right off the bat.  You simply can't throw that much abstract on a person that fast.  That's where learning curve comes in.

World-building, character details, etc. need to be built upon over the course of a manuscript, not covered in the first scene.  Each time you teach the reader something new about your world they need to digest it.  If you toss a ton of info down your readers' gullets too fast they'll get literary indigestion.  Not a pretty sight.

Info-dumping is your worst nightmare.  You can do similar things if you're a good writer using a Watson character or otherwise through dialogue, although you still must do it incrementally.  If you simply must get all the cool aspects of your story written down, put them as a list of notes in a separate file, don't add them to your manuscript.

Most people don't like heights.  Readers are similar in the literary world as they are in the physical world.  Thus, steep learning curves are scary and can lead to falling off the edge.  You really do not want that.

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