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Showing posts from December, 2012

Letting Characters Speak for Themselves

I am nearly finished with a series by Michael Sullivan called Riyria Revelations. I am not much of a fantasy reader, but I have thoroughly enjoyed this series, mostly (I think) because his story does not completely rely on magic, but instead uses it on occasion to help the characters. Overall, the characters do most of the work themselves. But the real reason I am posting today is to praise his technique. Not only is the story really enjoyable, but it is also well written. I have a lot of respect for Sullivan because he is a self-taught writer, having learned from the masters. And who are better teachers than that? He gets so many things right that I could go on for pages and pages. But I won't. My focus today is how he deals with info dumps. At some point or another, we all have to provide more information to our reader for him/her to fully grasp our story. The tricky part is integrating it into the story rather than making it feel like a "dump" of information.