onceatiger
Virgin
I was just working on a chapter for a story where the character doesn't fully understand new abilities they've gotten ("Would You Rather", if anyone's curious), and I wondered how people feel about that moment in a story when the main character settles down from the action for a bit to figure out how their powers work.
The way I see it, there's a few ways to handle this sort of thing.
1) You can gloss over it with something like "I experimented for a while and now I think I know how this works", then either give the reader a straightforward explanation or leave it up to surprise and the story to show them later on. This has the advantage of being speedy and concise, and (if you want) can make how things are supposed to operate very clear, which is occasionally helpful in a format where other people are allowed to add on their own contributions. It doesn't feel like very interesting storytelling, though.
2) You can fully narrate how your character explores their powers. You probably don't want to run down an entire exhaustive scientific-method-style testing period, because that's almost certainly gonna be boring, but a few tests along the lines of trying out scenarios can be interesting if you play them out right, and manages to give your readers some content while still letting your character figure out what the heck they're doing. The trouble here is that it doesn't have fast pacing, almost by definition. It can slow down the action, sometimes to the point where your readers might want to skip to the next bit.
3) Just don't do it - make your character so pressed for time, impatient, or dumb that they never bother learning how to control whatever it is they can do. Me, I find that option bothersome, but I think that's mostly just because of how antithetical it is to my way of thinking rather than any decent criteria of authorship.
How about you folks? Do you like to see these scenes? Is this kind of thing worth it, or does it kill the momentum and energy, especially in a sexy-type story like we tend to write here? Other thoughts?
The way I see it, there's a few ways to handle this sort of thing.
1) You can gloss over it with something like "I experimented for a while and now I think I know how this works", then either give the reader a straightforward explanation or leave it up to surprise and the story to show them later on. This has the advantage of being speedy and concise, and (if you want) can make how things are supposed to operate very clear, which is occasionally helpful in a format where other people are allowed to add on their own contributions. It doesn't feel like very interesting storytelling, though.
2) You can fully narrate how your character explores their powers. You probably don't want to run down an entire exhaustive scientific-method-style testing period, because that's almost certainly gonna be boring, but a few tests along the lines of trying out scenarios can be interesting if you play them out right, and manages to give your readers some content while still letting your character figure out what the heck they're doing. The trouble here is that it doesn't have fast pacing, almost by definition. It can slow down the action, sometimes to the point where your readers might want to skip to the next bit.
3) Just don't do it - make your character so pressed for time, impatient, or dumb that they never bother learning how to control whatever it is they can do. Me, I find that option bothersome, but I think that's mostly just because of how antithetical it is to my way of thinking rather than any decent criteria of authorship.
How about you folks? Do you like to see these scenes? Is this kind of thing worth it, or does it kill the momentum and energy, especially in a sexy-type story like we tend to write here? Other thoughts?
