--- Kevin Burton Smith
<
kvnsmith@thrillingdetective.com> wrote:
> Part of the appeal of fiction is the illusion
of
> stepping into
> another world, or at least seeing the same
world
> through someone
> else's vision. That's difficult to do when
the
> author acts like a
> chatty tour guide who stops to explain everything
to
> everyone.
I'm going to get a little off-topic here for a paragraph, but
I'll try to tie it all in at the end:
one reason I believe that the Tolkien and Star Trek
franchises (and, to a lesser extent, Star Wars) have been so
enormously popular is the amount of work that went on behind
the scenes, shaping history and characterization and so
forth, that the reader / viewer never learns (well, not
unless he/she reads all the appendices and the reader's
guides and tell-all books, etc.). Somehow that depth of
background makes it into the narrative--don't ask me how, but
it does--and the reader senses it. Tolkien, for crying out
loud, invented three or four languages in the process of
writing THE LORD OF THE RING, as well as hundreds (maybe
thousands) of years of fictional history.
I've been trying to think of a hard-boiled example to cite
here, but there really isn't anything in the hard-boiled
world that's generated the same following as Tolkien, is
there?
As for allusions or depth of detail, even when it goes
unexplained, I say the more, the better. Until life comes
with a guidebook, the lack of explanation is a heck of a lot
more realistic. And that's what hard-boiled is all about,
right? Well, sorta.
G.
===== George C. Upper III, Editor The Lightning Bell Poetry
Journal http://www.lightningbell.org/
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