My brother was telling me about a post at bar.baen.com where the author David Drake related his "plywood shield" principle. The background to the principle is that once he had written a story where the roman soldiers had plywood shields. Now, this is historically accurate. Roman soldiers did have plywood shields. But they had a constant stream of readers pointing out his "error", saying that they didn't have plywood back then. Finally his editor told him to take out the reference, because even though it was correct, it was causing readers to end their willing suspension of disbelief. So, the plywood shield principle is that you have to write to your audience; even if what you wanted to say is correct, if it would disrupt the suspension of disbelief it's a bad idea. BTW, David Drake is not a lightweight when it comes to history. He reads ancient roman texts in the original Latin for the fun of it.
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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen! - Samuel Adams
Ah, but in fantasy you still have to be internally consistent. You can't have a character creating a river of water in the first chapter and dying of thirst in the last unless you have a darn good reason.
-- Edited by arbilad at 13:01, 2007-09-21
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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen! - Samuel Adams
The best audience is intelligent, well-educated and a little drunk.
Jack mormons? :D
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"The promptings of the Holy Ghost will always be sufficient for our needs if we keep to the covenant path. Our path is uphill most days, but the help we receive for the climb is literally divine." --Elaine S. Dalton
Maybe he could just write a history note at the beginning of the novel explaining certain sticky historical points. Or add footnotes, like writers of Mormon historical novels do.
Maybe he could just write a history note at the beginning of the novel explaining certain sticky historical points. Or add footnotes, like writers of Mormon historical novels do.
I should have been more clear about what type of books he writes. He writes science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction novels typically don't have footnotes, and enough people ignore historical notes at the beginning of novels that he'd still be left with a lot of explaining to do. Besides, if you have to include a lot of explanations in a science fiction novel, it ruins the ability of the reader to suspend disbelief.
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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen! - Samuel Adams
I agree that sci-fi novels don't typically have footnotes. But since your avatar is Spock, I must point out the Star Trek novel "The Wounded Sky" by Diane Duane has two pages of endnotes. I even looked up a couple of the articles about parallel universes. Didn't understand a word of it, but the titles of the article matched. So her science must have been good.
I read footnotes and endnotes. But I'm weird that way. Heck, as I've just confessed, I even look up footnotes.
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