Devil in the Details
My writing suffers from an issue I’ve had since 3rd grade: I often find settings to be more interesting than plot. I eagerly bought the Atlas of Middle Earth when it came out, enjoy looking up technical speculations on the construction of the Ringworld (or even the Halo), and spend time considering how Hogwarts was built with such odd geometry, and why.
I think I sympathize with the authors of old Dungeons and Dragons game modules in that respect. Many of those old booklets contained fascinating, detailed maps, but the purpose to explore those maps generally centered around “looting”. Recognizing that, I tried to resurrect my old copy of Vault of the Drow as a basis for a campaign a few years back, but I didn’t do enough prep work and the effort failed. A sizeable underground metropolis shouldn’t be a place that the characters pass through with three sentences of description.
Short stories don’t tempt me as strongly to lose myself in world-building: the characters have things to do, and I need to get on with discussing what they’re up to. But a setting for a novel’s resided in my head for almost 15 years, and none of the conflicts I’ve hung on it seem adequate. In fact, many of the plots I’ve considered have a strong derivative aroma, and given my complaints that 68% of the SF/Fantasy section at Waldenbooks is actually the same book with the names and dates moved around, I’d like to make an original contribution to the field.
The work I’m doing for Decipher is having the effect of making me pay more attention to my style, anyway. I’m watching passive voice even more carefully than I had been, and checking out web pages such as Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See.
