Surround yourself with people who support you

When I say "surround yourself with people who support you", I'm not at all being cliché. The fact is that if you're creative in any way, you have to have a good support base - not because you need them to be creative, but because you need to them to help in the creative process, in the editing, in the feedback, in the final polish.

I had a friend who wrote a short novella which he asked me to proof-read and to design a book cover for, and I did. While the story wasn't really my thing, because the author was my friend I felt a responsibility to give him my support by doing both of the tasks he asked me to do (and for free). I wanted his story to be the best it could be - and I made sure my feedback was constructive, pertinent and honest. And he said he really appreciated it - even telling me that I should be an editor because he had really benefited from the feedback and the support I'd given him.

When I asked him to read my story and offer feedback, though...the support wasn't there. Several years ago I'd asked if he just wanted to read it - no need for feedback, I was just excited, like a little kid, and wanted to tell my story. He agreed to read five pages only - and then picked it apart, giving me what he deemed to be constructive criticism. And constructive critique is fine, but it's like advice: if it's given when it hasn't been asked for, it rubs people up the wrong way because it comes across as preachy and has a very strong element of "oh, you poor thing. You don't even know you're doing it all wrong. Here, let me salvage this train wreck for you...". In this case I hadn't asked him for criticism in any way - so perhaps you can imagine my irritation. I got over it, and actually did take some of the advice, which included "don't use so many m-dashes or semi-colons" (it's good feedback).

About a year ago, having proof-read and designed a cover for his work, I sent him mine...and he procrastinated. He had issues with me wanting to protect the security of the file (which I'd worked on for many, many years already at that stage) by having it a non-editable and non-printable pdf; so I changed the letters to shapes and made it editable/printable with a password, again in an effort to protect it should my email be hacked (I don't see myself as a hacking target, but if you create something then you take steps to protect it. That's just prudent). But this wasn't okay, and nor were any of my subsequent efforts to make the process easier - and in the end my "friend" had a go at me, telling me that he wasn't even sure he wanted to help me as I'd been pissed off at him when he'd offered feedback (unasked for) last time and that he didn't want to waste his time or energy. He also (so very kindly) said that I wasn't Stephen King and nobody cared about my writing enough for me to act like it was worth stealing by protecting it with passwords, and basically making it seem as though I had been totally unreasonable to expect him to put aside time to do the same thing I'd already done for him - especially since I just "refuse" to use Word, like 90% of the rest of the world.

I replied, saying that actually my computer didn't come with it built-in and so I'd been using InDesign, a far more intuitive (as far as I'm concerned) and powerful programme to write in, but that I didn't appreciate him finding excuse after excuse to not look at my work - and that I didn't want it to be soured by his attitude towards helping me the same way I'd already helped him, and that I'd now prefer him not to read it, knowing that he clearly found it too great a request of me to make.

He referenced it a few times in subsequent months, first by saying he'd find time, and then by saying he'd give me general feedback, rather than editing suggestions (I'd gone through his story with a fine-toothed comb), and each time I repeated myself that he'd already made it clear he didn't want to proof-read it and that I didn't want him to either anymore. Asking a friend to do something shouldn't be a big deal, but he'd made it into one - and I no longer felt as though our friendship included such elements. I wanted us to drop it, because if we didn't I'd get angry again that the work I'd put into his creative process had not been reciprocated.

Eventually he said it was probably a good thing he didn't proof-read as he'd looked at it and seen that my writing style was a bit "old-fashioned" and didn't flow like modern English, and he wasn't sure what kind of feedback he could offer that would be helpful when that wasn't his usual choice of style. Again, he'd found another reason to not live up to being a decent friend.

More recently he sent me a book he'd read once and thought I'd appreciate - Stephen King's On Writing, which interestingly says in the second foreword that all unnecessary words should be cut out, before (apparently not ironically) advancing to a third foreword. I thanked this "friend" for the book and he said it was partially a guilt gift for him not having read Silverwater. I told him that I didn't want him to feel guilty, but that I appreciated the book. His reply was "You do want me to feel guilty, or you'd let me read Silverwater". At this point I wasn't going to bite, and said definitively "Actually no, that's not about you at all. That's about me and how I feel about it."

And that's really what it boils down to: creativity isn't easy, and if someone's around to help you then excellent - but ultimately if someone is prepared to be there in name only, their involvement in your creative process is of no assistance to you. And it has to be. I am more than willing to assist in some way if I can to someone else's creativity, but ultimately it isn't about me at all - and I wouldn't ever want to make it so with my attitude or with my words. Me helping isn't about exacting payment in some other way, but I do think that as a friend I should be able to give assistance and to ask for it in kind if I ever do need it. That's what friendship is. And frankly, I was too good a friend to this person - and I realised that the moment it became clear to me that the effort I had gone to in order to provide help was not going to be reciprocated, and that rather than him telling me "I can't, I'm sorry", I was told the reason for him failing to help me out was, basically, me. Me telling him in the end that my decision to move on from asking for his assistance was about me and had nothing to do with him or how he felt about his own behaviour was my way of setting my own limits and denying him the ability to have a negative impact on my creativity.

He did try to have that negative impact again, however. After the horrible shootings in an Orlando gay club recently, he messaged me on Whatsapp with an anti-religion message and a link to a CNN article on the events. Rather than agreeing with his divisive, antagonistic stance, I told him that the shootings were the fault of extremism, and that he should be spending his energy mourning the victims rather than opportunistically using it as a soapbox moment to promote his personal crusade against religion (which is actually the subject of his novella. I'll return to this in a moment). Rather than taking a moment to think things through, this "friend" told me that "[I]'m a creep and [I]'ve turned into a real cunt", saying "no wonder [I] don't have any friends", and requesting I not contact him again. When I refused to engage beyond commenting on his behaviour by saying "You're a child", he said "You're a friendless asshole who only feels good about himself by pitting [sic] others down all the time. You really should become a critic, especially since your fiction sucks pretentious ass" - and then blocked me. It was a BIG case of projection, as far as I'm concerned, as I've rarely been baited into yelling matches with him and at all times try to see multiple sides of things. Even in this instance, I can really only guess that he felt me telling him that this wasn't the time to promote an anti-religion agenda was some kind of personal attack on him, when it mentioned noting about him at all. The only time I said anything about him ("You're a child") was after he'd launched himself into calling me names and trying to make me feel bad by making baseless claims about me not having any friends, like we're in a schoolyard playground. After the effort I had gone to in order to be a good friend and to help him create something he could then proudly show the world, not only did he not help me in a similar fashion but the one lasting piece of feedback he wanted to leave me with about my work was that it "sucks pretentious ass". As I said, I was too good a friend to him, and that frustrates me.

What frustrates me more is that the novella he wrote in which Christianity was the antagonist has proven less of an exploration of a concept or an idea and more of a reflection of how he really feels about religion in general - and I don't subscribe to that ideology. I'm not religious, but I'm more open to the notion that other people see the world in ways different to how I see it than I used to be. And it sucks to know that so many people out there are caught up in the antagonism of "us versus them", as demonstrated here. And this is where me being too good a friend comes in again - I designed the book cover for the novella. Knowing that I thought it just a modern interpretation of the underlying ideas behind 1984 but with religion as the antagonist, I didn't feel it was really "my" kind of thing - but I gave constructive feedback on it, and agreed to design the book cover. Looking back I wish I hadn't. Feedback would've been fine, but (unless he reissues it with a new ISBN and a different cover) my name will always be used in association with the project as the designer of the cover. In a way I feel as though that could be taken to mean I endorse the message the project bears, which I don't. As a fictional story it can be taken at face value, but as a piece of the antagonistic rhetoric between different ideologies I feel I should have refused to design anything for it. I suppose I can't really change that now. If there were any decency in this "friend", he'd refuse to use the cover I designed now anyway. Chances are, though, he won't, and my name will forever be found in the small print of the book. I was too good a friend, and I regret that.

The perils of seeking information

I've been working on repainting the 19 pictures for my children's book a fair bit this year, and in doing so have de-prioritised my current writing project. I feel so guilty about it. I've managed to knock out about as many words of the first draft as I've written for the entirety of my first manuscript, but this story isn't more than two-thirds of the way to the end (and it feels like less than halfway, if I'm realistic about my plan)...but I've managed to advance it significantly beyond the initial point where I left off last year, at what felt like the end of the first "act" - a completely arbitrary point, really, as I'd never planned it in parts, but it really felt like the conclusion of some part of the story. In short, it's languishing a bit in the dusty corner of my memory stick, from where it sends little messages to ask me why I've spurned it, why I've forgotten it, whether it's just another of those misbegotten attempts at telling a pointless tale that'll go nowhere. No, little story. I'll come back for you, and I'll take you out for ice cream to make up for it, I promise.

This kids' book is something I've had in my mind since I was maybe 13 or 14 - so it's been a great idea in my head for over half of my life. Not just in my head, actually: after the end of a fairly significant relationship way back in 2008, I realised I had to make time for myself and for the things I wanted to get done - rather than focusing all of my energy on trying to sort out the mess of that ended entanglement. And I did - I spent the next two years working piecemeal on deciding which words to use and crafting pictures. By some time during 2010 I had a retinue of watercolour paintings depicting what I wanted to show - and I was really pleased with the result. Looking back I can see the flaws and the faults; I'd never really been into painting very much prior, so it was a bit of a learning process for me - but then, for the first intimidating attempt at committing paint to paper as more than a last resort I had done pretty well.

In 2013 I returned to school to study graphic design, having successfully trained and worked for three years as a registered nurse. The two are completely related, obviously. I devoted hour upon hour to achieving results in that course, and felt overwhelmingly as if I were doing what I should have been doing from day one vocationally. One of the projects was the creation of a book - and most of my classmates chose to create a children's book. It seemed a fairly universal desire among us to write and illustrate a book, quite apart from learning the basics of book-binding as well as page imposition, how to create book signatures, how to design dust jackets, and so on. I created one of the by-then several kids' books I'd made plans for since 2008, and then returned to it and created another book for my end-of-year project - and painting approximately 35 painted pages across the pair of them, taking perhaps 25 days for each set of illustrations.

You can probably imagine that I didn't have time to choose actual watercolour paper, to stretch the low-quality paper I had to use, or to even get excellent photos/scans of the pages. While I was extremely pleased at what for me was a monumental effort and its outcome, I've known since I completed them that as first editions of these books they were good as concepts - but not really market-ready. Quite apart from that, response to them has been mixed: some, like my design tutor, spoke nothing but praise for them, while others, such as a manuscript assessor I engaged with, offered less encouraging critique. And that's fine - I wouldn't want stuff that could be improved to not be brought up, even if I don't agree with it in the end. I appreciate feedback.

In any case, as I mentioned I've been working this year predominantly on redoing the paintings for the original story, which was the "other" book I produced as part of my end-of-year project - and this time on watercolour paper that I've stretched myself. So far the paintings have turned out (as expected) a great deal more refined and polished - though I wouldn't make any claim to be a watercolour master, the pictures are in a style I've become comfortable with. I have 19 to do, and have completed a third of them - which is well on track for having them finished before the end of the year (though not for having them finished by the end of June, as I'd wondered about doing).

But what then, when I do finish them? Well...I guess here again falls the shadow of self-publishing. Did I ever tell you about that one time I sought information from a self-publishing company and ended up regretting it, a whole freaking lot? Yes? No? Well, just in case I haven't, I'll tell you again.

I made the mistake some time in 2014 of searching for self-publishing companies on the internet. I should probably take that back, really - the mistake wasn't searching, but rather the assumption that I made that if a company has a web address that ends in ".co.nz" then it's probably more aligned with my outlook as a New Zealand-based or a New Zealand-associated company. Why was that assumption made in error? Well, mostly because it's a marketing tactic - on the one hand it appeals to nationalism, and the idea that if it's locally-made or locally-sourced then it must be better (I don't subscribe to this notion, or to nationalism as a mindset); on the other it counts on the consumer's feelings of trust or mistrust, because if a company is based closer to home then it will operate under socially-recognise rules of fairness, be more accessible, and have the interests of the locals at heart, right? Well, perhaps - after all, I might be able to speak in real time to a person representing a local company and a certain (false) sense of camaraderie might make them less officious and more prone to want to solve problems I might have or seek the best outcome for me. Or maybe not - but those are the assumptions that people make (and often why so many people are against outsourcing, quite apart from their notions that a company outsourcing their customer service department, for instance, takes jobs away from the local economy [even this is a bit of an assumption - after all, perhaps the company just can't afford to have a local department due to overheads, due to how many employees, infrastructure...who knows?]. Unfortunately it starts to go beyond nationalism and into outright xenophobia - but that's a subject for some other time, and maybe some other blog out there).

In any case, I selected one agency with a .co.nz, and made an enquiry - basically just wanting to find out more information on what services there were available. In the enquiry I asked to be emailed, but for some reason or other I supplied my mobile phone number - either because I was required to, or because I tend to provide extra information even when I don't have to. I'm a real dork like that.

Not long after, I received a phone call from a "publishing agent" (i.e. a salesperson) who proceeded to try to sell me a deal they had. I said to him at the time that I had really only wanted to find out information, but I also made the stupid mistake of not saying "I was not wishing to buy anything at this time and this conversation doesn't appear to be about providing me with information, so I will be hanging up now. Thanks, goodbye". Instead I stayed on the phone, politely saying "that deal sounds interesting, however I would like to receive information in written form so could you email it to me so I can have a look at what the deals are?" for 40 minutes. What really got me was that rather than being listened to (and this is said with full recognition that the guy was trying to make a sale and earn commission, and that I should have terminated the phone call when it became clear that it did not meet my needs), the sales rep heard my lack of enthusiasm as "I need more convincing, so convince me". I'm sure you can imagine the lines he started reeling off to me: "I have every faith that your book will be amazing", "I love children's books. They really fire the imagination. I would love to read yours to my kids" and "I don't want you to miss out on this opportunity. If you never take the plunge it might never be published and everyone will miss out". And I'm sure you can imagine the tone in which everything was said - that I'm-insincere-but-I'm-trying-to-sound-as-if-I-mean-it tone that I think is more offensive than if someone is clearly not interested and isn't going to pretend otherwise, because they go from knowing you can see they don't care to appealing to your vanity, for one, and treating you like you're an idiot who can't see through their act. It wasn't as if the guy had a sample of my work, or knew anything about me - and yet there he was on the other end of the phone telling me he knew in his heart that my book would be a success and that he wanted to read it himself.

At length I managed to conclude the conversation, appreciating the assurance of this sales rep that he would wait for me to be in touch if I "had enough faith in my own book" to go ahead with it. He sent me the information, which I skim-read - seeing it was clearly not information I really had use for - and decided not to reply. Not long later I received another phone call - same guy, same situation, same amount of time wasted on the phone. I should know, really, that if I don't want to be on the phone then I don't have to be. I have respect for others enough to know that a conversation just abruptly terminated without a conclusion is downright rude - so I never just hang up the phone. However, again I should have said to him "this conversation is not one I feel meets my needs, so I will say goodbye. Thanks for your time", and have hung up then - clearly letting him know why I were hanging up. But no, instead I listened to him, repeating myself over and over again about how it wasn't the right time for me to be pursuing any of these deals, and that the deals didn't match my needs. I got more of the same lines, though I remember them being more skewed towards "well if you haven't got the faith to stand behind your book..." - clearly the company in question, and certainly their sales rep, thought that manipulating someone by calling them spineless in the face of opportunity was a great way to secure a sale and make money. The conversation didn't really advance, though I did tell him at one stage that I didn't want to spend as much money as the deals required when I wasn't ready to publish and that I was still at work on my book - and that again I had really only wanted information at this stage. So we terminated the conversation at that stage, and I felt I had respectfully made my position clear.

I heard nothing until one evening I got another call about six months after my initial enquiry. The numbers had always been preceded by 001 (the US calling code), though for some reason the sales rep had always spoken of calling from Australia, and I have several friends who live in the US - so I assumed that after six months of non-contact that it might have been someone I knew calling from a different number. Nope, it was the same guy.

"Hello, Simone? I'm calling to let you know we have 50% off our deals at the moment. As soon as I got the memo today I thought of you as I know you'd said one of your concerns was the price of our deals" he said. It took him till the third time of saying my name to get it right (apparently "Simon" is a fairly unusual name, though with the number of times I've encountered others with it in my lifetime I'd not have assumed so), and at this stage I was fairly unimpressed. I remained polite, but I kept the conversation short this time - after all, how honest can a person claim to be in their statements of "as soon as I was made aware of this I thought of you, though I couldn't for the life of me remember the pronunciation of your name"? Made worse, of course, by the fact that he would have had my file on his screen, so his mispronunciation really wasn't excusable. I said to him that he was welcome to send the information to my email (where it would go directly to my junk folder) and that if I were interested I would get in touch with him.

After that I saved the number under a name I knew not to pick up to, and further received perhaps five or six calls from it. After several I was emailed about not missing out on the opportunity to self-publish, and am in fact still, two years after I initially requested information, receiving emails trying to convince me to buy-in: "Please let us know if you would like to embark on the journey of self-publishing with us". I'd say my over-all lack of response at this point should be indication enough that I am not interested, but after the second phone call I had ignored (and fifth call in total) I had also sent an email to the general contact address asking for my information to be taken off their system as I was at this point feeling moderately harassed. Clearly I wasn't listened to - and that makes me think that the sales rep was and is actually following company policy by becoming so insistent about me becoming a customer and not letting me return to them when and if I were ever ready. And if this is company policy...well, it doesn't inspire confidence in their overall business model.

What lesson did I take from this? Well, mostly: do not seek information from companies which wish to sell something - this will be taken as a sales lead. Personally I felt so hounded that I have become a dedicated non-customer of this particular self-publishing company, and will discourage others on a person-to-person basis from contacting them or engaging with them. Certainly this is a technical loss of business for the company in question, but obviously their tactics of hounding people into being customers work on some level - or they'd change their approach. I'm not suggesting people are necessarily being bullied into buying - if they're anything like me, even their desire to maintain respectful communication and their wish to remain polite won't result in them spending money they do not want to spend. But I do wonder whether sometimes people who don't know better do feel pressured, coerced and manipulated by sales tactics like this; after all, enough people must respond to flattery regarding how their book just must be made available for the world because it's certain to be that special (even though it has never been seen by the person paying such compliments) by buying a self-publishing package that this approach helps to keep the company afloat.

What I also learnt is that if I do not wish to speak to someone about something then I don't have to. I'm usually pretty good at concluding phone calls I don't wish to remain participant of these days, but every-so-often I remember the two 40-minute phone calls I had with the sales rep from this company and it re-steels me against wasting my time and my energy on things I know I'm not interested in.

So, what am I doing at this point? Not investigating what my options are. If something crosses my path I might make note of it and secrete that information away somewhere for reference later on, but for now concentrating on what I need to get done at this point is probably the better thing to do. Don't try to run before you can walk, as the saying (sort-of) goes: do what must be done and then do what must be done next, rather than trying to get everything all lined up ahead of time. Early preparation is a good way to approach things, but things can change. Like aeroplane ticket prices, for instance. The best idea is to have a plan and a timeline of sorts, otherwise you end up being chased and pressured by parts of the process that shouldn't even be rearing their heads yet. I still have painting to get done.

On how to tell a story, whichever way you choose

There are many different ways of telling stories. Or showing, if you accept movies and games a storytelling media - which they are, for sure, as far as I'm concerned. Sure, movies take shortcuts and sometimes if you sit down and think about what you've seen it isn't really logical or sensible, but overall the story is what you're going to watch - even if it's all about explosions and sudden scares, there has to be a framework for everything to operate within and occur because of, and that's the story. Games are often viewed as an escapist way to not deal with serious things, but people expect games to have more than just a superficial reason to exist (mostly). Absolutely many people will say "well, you have to accept things as they are in games - they're not real", and to a point that's true - but more and more people don't just accept things as they are because they're not real in the media they engage with. There has to be sense and cohesion, even when something's utterly fabricated.

Some people like to tell a story by details (for the billionth time I mention J.R.R. Tolkien) that enrich the world but don't allow much reader speculation. I mentioned this in a "recent" post (because really, it's been a little bit of time since I last updated): Tolkien doesn't seem to like the reader to imagine anything he doesn't wish to expound upon. The opposite of Tolkien would be From Soft with their Dark Souls/Demon's Souls/Bloodborne games: the plot is given as a vague basis for the action, and the details of events that have occurred that provide other non-player characters with their motivations and justifications are left excessively blurry.

The juxtaposition between the two approaches is fairly stark.

One creates the impression of a fleshed-out world wherein the characters exist by way of extra detail that squares everything away as a locked-down definite. The characters exist as a product of that world because not only their immediate setting and how they interact with and influence (and are influenced by) it is clear, but also the delineated history of that setting and its reason for existence is given, as well as the ancestry of the character as a person is given. There can be no mistake: if one does not know who the mother of a character is or was, it's only because of what I deem to be a weird and archaic focus on patrilinear succession and descent - not because such a detail hasn't be thought of and decided upon by the author (in this case Tolkien, but really any of his general discipline). One certainly knows the father, the father's father, and the often the father's father's father by name or, at least, title.

This puts the reader in a position of omniscience. A huge number of people like this approach: it really does give the world in question a richness and depth, and I appreciate that as much as anyone else does. Most people out there in the world aren't historians, linguists or anthropologists, and yet an extraordinary number of us will spend hours reading the histories of made-up peoples and their cultures. It's just interesting. Stories are interesting, and the fuller the story, the more story is told.

The downside to this is that it also creates a certain detachment in the audience. We all read, feel invested, and support the goodies while decrying the baddies. But we have a false sense of understanding of the world presented: we're told things are a certain way, and we read them in the most objective way we can...but as the adage goes, history is written by the victor. The author is a stand-in for such a victor, because it is their vision that we see. We're told who the good guys are and who're the bad, and we just have to accept that (and we willingly do), and invest in the success of those we're told should succeed and the failure of those we're told should fail. In a way it's a very propagandistic way to view the world: we aren't given any conflicting information that demands we must consider multiple viewpoints at once. In fact, we're often given multiple plots to follow, but because we're told everything in such immense detail there's really nothing we have to process beyond the words on the page. We have our hands held so tightly that we're not allowed to imagine anything. Even items are described in such glorious detail that we're told what precise hue the metal has in seven different kinds of light, including sometimes no light at all, because it glows when there's evil a-lurkin'.

Being able to enjoy the full expanse of a world means one has what one considers a full understanding of its reaches and its reasons, but it's what could be called objective subjectivity: such a detailed and easily-seen example of Everything creates the impression of everything being out in the open, but it's still fed to us through the firm grip of a singular guiding hand whose design is anything but objective and nothing but subjective due to their own desires and motivations for communicating the story to begin with.

The opposite approach provides an equally fleshed-out world, but it does so through suggestion and implication. Perhaps this is more the approach of visual, experiential storytelling (as in, you discover as you explore, i.e., play a game) than it is the non-actively-participatory storytelling of books and movies, because as with life if one doesn't encounter a certain situation one cannot learn from it or understand it. It would depend on how linear or non-linear the experienced story is made to be, for certain - a character in Demon's Souls, for instance (and yeah, the name is spelt with a possessive apostrophe despite there being many beings one might describe as demons. It always has bothered me. The final boss isn't really made a big enough deal of in the game to warrant the assignment of all souls as belonging to it - but perhaps this is an instance of non-definite storytelling?), may never be encountered if one doesn't know to look and doesn't stumble upon them by accident, and yet the story remains the story. That character is still there, with whatever knowledge/perspective/skill they possess in isolation from you, the player, and their own story, or the suggestion of their own story, remains as well. Your story may involve encountering them, but if it doesn't it's still a complete story, insofar as your story can be described as complete(d). Life is exactly that - encounters happen or don't, but for all the opportunities taken or missed the life "story" of the person living it is still complete unto itself.

I quite enjoy stories that work based on this premise, as it reflects the uncertainty there always is in reality (which many people prefer to pretend doesn't exist, unfortunately. After all, their understanding is the fullest, most sensible and in all ways the best, and if war should be declared based upon that understanding then of course only a fool would fail to see the justice in such fighting). No person can ever hope to have anything more than a viewpoint of the world as seen through their own filters, and no person can ever hope to know another anywhere near as close as they know themselves. Backstories are related from subjectivity to subjectivity - and a story that is told in such a style creates a more realistic impression because of the sophistication in recognising and creating a subjective, limited and therefore limitless reality. Stories that take this approach encourage the audience to engage in speculation and become part of the storytelling process themselves, going from a passive absorbent sponge with reading (or viewing) ability to an active contributor to the shape of the story as they understand it - which again reflects the nature of the world and of experience, and also of being presented with a framework upon which to build understanding. There's room for uncertainty and that creates room for imagination and a feeling, potentially, of cracking a code when everything starts to slide into place.

The problem, though, is that if a story is to be told with the approach of "well, I don't know that because I'm just the storyteller, not the person living it", the idea of cohesion can become a bit weak. Details that don't match between events may be interpreted as different perspectives of connected situations, or misremembered hand-me-down tales; but they might also be accidental contradictions that weren't caught in the editing process because details are so nebulous as to be almost unhelpful. And maybe slightly more distressingly, it may afford the opportunity for the storyteller to not really bother to create a real version of the story that is the "true" account of events upon which the told story is draped. There are two types of "not knowing the details" - the kind wherein everything is set in stone but the story released to the audience is filtered and skewed, asking them to engage and piece the story together from what is shown or told to them, and the kind wherein not everything makes sense because it doesn't quite fit together due to bad planning on behalf of the storyteller.

Just as a fully-detailed world creates a kind of objective subjectivity, an "unexplained" world creates a sense of subjective objectivity: each person gleans what they will from the evidence presented, but is left unable to make absolute judgement calls because they're forced to recognise that there is a plurality of perspectives which are unknowable and unable to be experienced.

There's room for both approaches, for sure. People crave details and really enjoy gaining ever more full understanding of things they're invested in; but people also enjoy being able to help make sense of a story for themselves and the suggestion that there are things to be discovered that are by definition undiscoverable.

I do think, though, that the need to give details to flesh out a story is something that a lot of people fall trap to. I remember reading a draft of a story a few years ago and feeling really jarred by the sudden removal of myself from the flow of the story to be told that the event a character had just mentioned was known as _____, a situation that had lasted however-many-years and had been resolved by whatever. It was a first draft, of course, but my first feedback was that details like that are great to have as part of the story, but if they are to be included they have to have a natural place, or they can be added as a footnote or as part of an appendix section. I don't think the feedback was appreciated, and I felt bad for having stepped in to say anything at all - I hurt the feelings of the author and he stopped talking to me. I hadn't been rude but I had overstepped a boundary, I figured, and it bothered me that I'd had a negative impact in that way. As a reader, though, I didn't need to know the particulars of that piece of history at that time, and I felt really removed from the story by the sudden appearance of superfluous information placed to flesh the world out more. Unless the information is included to enrich the story itself it ends up creating a more expansive world at the expense of the story itself - and that shouldn't be something that happens. People love their details, but if they want to include them (which they should feel free and proud and empowered to do) then the way to do it best would be by following the example of Tolkien: finding ways to create a culture that involves reference to forebears, or history, as a natural part of its ways, so that details are found out as the culture is demonstrated.

And then there's exposition, another matter altogether. In my novella manuscript I use exposition a lot - because I'm telling a broader story as experienced by many characters whose thoughts and considerations the audience is privy to. I'm sure some people won't like having so much set out before them, and that's alright. The story I'm working on right now (still at 35,500 words because slow is the progress I make sometimes) takes are far less "I can read your thoughts" approach - because it's a lot stronger on telling the story as it happens as opposed to how each person is affected by it. However...this is probably best left for another post.