I’m making some progress on Godred. I think I have finally reached a turning point. Earlier, I thought what I was writing was good, but now I think what I am writing is *right*. There is a big difference.

***

You’d be surprised at how often real life tosses you a nugget that applies directly to writing. I don’t mean, “Ooh! Shiny! Something I can plop as a detail into my story.” I think anyone who disconnects themselves from the flow of habit/daily life can have one of those moments where you see your surroundings with fresh eyes. (Or if you live in Austin, can notice that it is slowly morphing into Dallas. *ugh*)

I am taking a teaching class this semester, and we were talking about reading strategies for foreign language learners. One way to help them understand more of what they read is to help them use their knowledge of the world to decode what is one the page. We don’t just have disconnected bits of info about the world floating around in our heads. We make connections between them, or organize them in other ways. One way of doing this is by means of “schemas” and “scripts”.

Schemas are like a diagram; they include all the most pertinent information about a thing. Take a move theater, for example. Most American (and German and French, from what I’ve seen) movie theaters have posters and a ticket booth out front, a snack bar inside, someone to tear your ticket, one or more screens/theaters, rows of plush seats, sticky floors, etc. If someone says “movie theater” to you, all of these things are activated, so to speak.

Scripts are a sequence of actions, like a movie script. For the script “going to a movie”, you can expect certain things to take place, with little variation. If you go to a movie, you will need to buy or pick up a ticket, walk past the snack bar (with or without snack purchase), find the right theater, pick out a seat, the lights will go out, you will watch previews, then the film, then the credits, and so on.

This real-world knowledge on the part of the reader is something a writer has to keep in mind. If you describe every part of the movie theater, or every step in going to a movie, the reader will be bored out of his skull, because he already knows how it will go. I guess if you were writing about a person who had never experienced these things, you might be justified in such extensive description, but then again, you may just be writing a rip-off of _Splash_. *g*

You can ground the reader in the setting with just one or two small details that let him know, “Hey! Movie theater here!” For example, two characters converse while waiting in a stupidly long snack-bar line, or complaining about the lack of a favorite movie-going snack, or laughing at the trailers. *Your* mental movie theater may not be the same as the reader’s, but the reader will get that much more out of your story if you let him use his own as the background to *your* story.

But if your character is at a 3D movie or the IMAX, I think that would be an important detail to mention, because that is additional info about the character, not just the setting. When I think about 3D movies, I think “camp.” When I think about IMAX, I think “educational” and “expensive”. Those associations (which are personal and not the same as schemas or scripts) add a little more nuance to a character.

On the other hand, it is easy (and the 7 Dwarfs know I do it) to not put in enough info, or put in the wrong info and lead readers astray. WesTexGirl pointed out in an earlier version of Godred that she got that he was on a college campus, but she couldn’t tell for certain if it was supposed to be a modern or pseudo-medieval setting. I wanted the reader to be able to “plug into” the story, but I didn’t give her enough info to do that sufficiently, and that made it less enjoyable. No one wants to be in limbo, even when reading a made-up story.