“Nothing brings out the cruelty of characters like a story of a prospecting town and the people who get taken there.
What works in The Grot is that we don’t spend a shitload of time setting up the fictional world, which is usually kind of a boring, overdone process in a lot of books if you ask me. It gives us just enough, but the main thrust of everything would work in the real world.
Whenever a story explains too much, I feel like the characters in Jurassic Park. Remember that part where they’re on the ride that explains how dinosaurs were made, and they break the ride and get off because they’re like, “Let’s see these fuckin’ dinosaurs already”? That’s how I feel in most books. I want to break something and then see the dinosaurs. Doesn’t have to be in that order, but I’d like to do those two things.
Nothing kills my reader stiffy like listening to the history of a bunch of made-up nonsense. Or the science behind something that is scientific up to a point, then takes a hard left into fiction. Like…I don’t need to know how warp speed works in Star Trek. Just tell me that it works, we’re good. As long as you don’t plan on solving problems by going really fast, that’s not important, and Star Trek rarely solves problems by going really fast.
I could never get through Dune because I’m like, “I give very few fucks, and even fewer of them flying, and I can’t give any kind of fuck, flying or otherwise, about the history of where a sword came from.””