Exchange of Realities

I get questions sometimes about whether I’m being too finicky in my advice, particularly from the gaming side of the equation. “I wonder if this is really appreciated,” Brent Newhall mused when I wrote about the design of species (amusingly enough, not too distant from the time Gygaxian Naturalism became a buzzword in the RPG Bloggers’ community). I once drove one of my coworkers to irritation asking questions about why his explanation for a change in society in the city we were writing our adventure in worked—I suppose an hour of “but why?” would get old after a while.

While some would say the answer to the question is yes, I continue to disagree. Details are important—they make the piece, be it game or story, real. If I read a piece about killing from the eyes of a dog, I’ll look at it, breeze my way through the salt-taste of the blood and the warm flesh tearing—honestly, how many times has it been told that way now? It’s abstract. A thousand geese die in the jaws of a thousand dogs, the Ur-goose under the Ur-dog’s fangs, and I shrug and go back to trying to explain why I need more context or why I consider being called a warehouse to be the ultimate insult to a library.

Then I critique my critiques, and imagine the same scene written in a way that would engage me. Now, along with the heat, salt and tearing, we have the slight disorientation of being clouted on the head by a wing as the goose resists. And that bit where the bite comes in wrong and the narrator ends up with a nose full of feathers. I’m not even entirely sure if the feathers would happen (I’m pretty sure the wing-smack would, though, from what I know of waterfowl), but it feels like it would, and that grounds it and gives it depth. Now we’re not in the dog vs. goose equivalent of Hero’s Journey #974523, we’re seeing Ulfric of Newfoundland and that blasted goose from the neighbor’s yard. Localized. Grounded. Real.

The little details make experiences memorable as well. I’ve been on a trolley more times than I care to think about, but I could easily pick out the time it was before dawn, pea-soup fog, and the haze made the sparks thrown off the overhead cable look like lightning. As I write this draft today, I’m flying over the Pacific Ocean, and what I’m going to remember most about this trip isn’t the endless blue sea (a lot of writers seem to gloss over the white specks in it), but that odd little ring-rainbow that’s been following along the surface of the clouds, and the way it doubled, both size and band count, when it hit that mackerel sky cirrus layer.

People do pick up on these details. I had one time, running a little side-thing for one of my players, in which his character was following one of the NPCs to go talk to someone else. They’ve done so before, so they try knocking, sure that just before their hands hit the door they’ll hear that usual “Come in.” Only they don’t, so they know he’s out. Player told me it was nifty.

So think about the details. And remember: that which nobody has said before, nobody has heard before. That which nobody has heard before is new. That which is new is interesting.

Don’t you want to be interesting?