Read on Twitter
TBH I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about and trying to undo my internal brain conditioning that insists everything I write has to encompass an intricate universe where all the parts fit together and everything makes sense. https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1260677504639131649
Down with perfectly quantifiable magic systems, basically. I want to write a book when I’m writing, not play D&D.
I don’t know why this “but everything must make sense” has been hammered so deeply into my brain. Most SFF only does a great job of having a veneer of plausibility/consistency while actually being just as silly as the next thing when you examine it with deep knowledge.
And this is such a weird internal governor to be fighting for me, because I don’t even LIKE books where the intricate world building is the point. I generally find them boring.
The whole artifice is that things have to hold together in a way that works for the reader and gets them to buy in. If you don’t get that buy in, no level of deep construction is going to stop someone from picking your world apart because they’re bored.
Which honestly SNOWPIERCER is a great example. Everyone knows the framework is deeply silly, and good on the movie for being so balls out about it. It either works for you because the story speaks, or it doesn’t. The train isn’t what makes it work or not.
And this whole genre wank about magic systems or how great your orbital mechanics are also privileges certain types of stories and certain orientations to detail. (Like lemme tell you my bitterness about the obsession with physics while the geology is laughable.)
This is why the old screen writing saw of “don’t let the facts get in the way of the truth” just fucking blew my mind when I was taking classes.
Anyway, why is it like this? I don’t know. Certain types of readers gatekeeping? Certain types of privileged authors setting the norms for taste. Just a phase, a zeitgeist that’s maybe changing?
Also like this here: https://twitter.com/jeannette_ng/status/1260901508725510144?s=21
Because I’ve gotten crit that I really put my foot down on because particularly if you’re doing first or third person limited, I don’t give a fuck how the engine works or the economy is put together and neither does the character if they’re not an engineer or an economist.
A character having imperfect knowledge and understanding of their world doesn’t make them unreliable. It just makes them like... pretty real.
Tell your story in the way that it needs to be told and it’ll either work or it won’t, the end.
(Also we *know* science fiction doesn’t have to be “realistic” or live in a fully thought out universe from A to Z to have a profound real world effect on science and technology and cultural discussion because Star Trek.)
