Re: Character description

On Sep 16, 3:28 am, zebo...@xxxxxxxxx (Zeborah) wrote:
Tina Hall <Tina_H...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Zeborah <zebo...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
And (though I think most of us use the term more broadly now) I
think Jo originally meant 'incluing' to cover terms where you're
getting the information across not only bit by bit, but actually
implicitly. For example, if it was a contemporary story, you
could get someone's age (and possibly geographic location...)
across by saying "He'd heard about the Challenger explosion on
the car radio on the way to his first ever job interview," so
even though you don't actually *say* how old he is, any reader
who cares can figure it out pretty easily.

Anyone who remembers such dates, or even just years.

Any reader who cares could take 15 seconds to google it, or to phone a
library to ask.

My problem with this is that it means, for those readers who wouldn't
remember or who might not have been alive at the time, stopping in the
middle to look something up so it would have meaning, and it's a bit
more disruptive to the reading experience than looking up a word you
might not know. At least with words, you might get the meaning from
context.

The other problem with this is that the reference would mean different
things over the years. So, a character who might be thirty when you
read the book when first published, would need to still be thirty for
people reading the book 5-10 years later. I'd prefer the author to
slap a year on the book somewhere upfront, than to have to play
guessing games re: the character's age. And books that reference
events can feel very dated very quickly. I've read a lot of books like
that and sometimes, the book is good enough for me to not notice or
care, but other times, it becomes a distraction.

Granted, this was just an example and there are plenty of other types
of info to get across with this technique that would work nicely, but
when it comes to events linked to age, it can be unhelpful.

For me, it's often how seamless the info is presented, and a lot of
these constructions often read clumsy to me. I can see what the author
is doing. As with everything, it's how well you can pull it off that
matters. Until everyone is reading an ebook with a quick link to all
these references to put them in their proper time and place, such
references might be lost to a portion of the readers. Just something
to keep in mind when coming up with them and working them into the
prose.

--Shelly
.

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