the eyes have it
Oct. 23rd, 2021 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliWhen writing description in a story, always remember the point of view.
And when NOT writing description in a story, always remember the point of view.
If you are writing about workers trudging home from sixteen hours of work, in field or factory, down ways they have been thousands of times before, you may have to resort to an omniscient narrator to describe anything of their walk.
But it's usually not that bad -- or plausible that the description would be that scanty. I still remember a book where two characters, both battle-hardened warriors in fantasy, were walking down a road in unsettled lands. Neither one thought anything about the scene. Not whether it was wide-open, giving them no place to hide from attack but also decreasing risk of ambush, or they were surrounded by trees or outcroppings of roads with the opposite problem, or whether the marshy ground gave them the worst of both worlds since there could certainly be monsters that could ambush them from the waters while entering the waters would only mean death.
It's a tradeoff being plausibility and successful info-dumping, being not, in principle, different from making sure dialog is what a character would actually say even when it's used for info-dumping.
And when NOT writing description in a story, always remember the point of view.
If you are writing about workers trudging home from sixteen hours of work, in field or factory, down ways they have been thousands of times before, you may have to resort to an omniscient narrator to describe anything of their walk.
But it's usually not that bad -- or plausible that the description would be that scanty. I still remember a book where two characters, both battle-hardened warriors in fantasy, were walking down a road in unsettled lands. Neither one thought anything about the scene. Not whether it was wide-open, giving them no place to hide from attack but also decreasing risk of ambush, or they were surrounded by trees or outcroppings of roads with the opposite problem, or whether the marshy ground gave them the worst of both worlds since there could certainly be monsters that could ambush them from the waters while entering the waters would only mean death.
It's a tradeoff being plausibility and successful info-dumping, being not, in principle, different from making sure dialog is what a character would actually say even when it's used for info-dumping.