3 ms·
I'm not sure what's preferable: your described mystery of a story, or the stereotypical "20 minutes of backstory and how we know their family" before getting to
by Arrath 4y ago
I'm not sure what's preferable: your described mystery of a story, or the stereotypical "20 minutes of backstory and how we know their family" before getting to the meat of it.
- dahwolf 4y agoIs your wife behind all these recipe blogs?
- yamtaddle 4y agoYeah, that's the kind I get. A 30-second story stretched to several minutes. Every conversation related line-by-line even when most of it's not important and could have been summed up or omitted. It's... sure something. She has a much better memory than me, though, and sometimes I wonder if it's because she recounts damn near every event in her life to someone else at least once (often three or four times) in great detail shortly after it happens, effectively giving it a thorough review while it's still fresh, while I pretty much never do that. ... but, if it's not a story, I do also get the starting-to-talk-with-no-context thing where IDK WTF she's talking about. "What do you think about red?" Red... what? To paint something? If so, what? Is that the title of something? For a shirt color? As a color, in general? The entry in the Bleu/Blanc/Rouge trilogy? The Target Red card? Flowers? We weren't even talking about anything! She says she kinda starts conversations in her head and it's not always the first part that comes out when she finally starts talking. Doesn't even realize she's done it until it's pointed out.
- Ancapistani 4y agoMy wife is the same way, though I don't think it's anything specific to her or her sex - I suspect it's just inherent in the bond that people form when spending a great deal of time together. Most of the time, when she starts conversations in the middle, I'm able to instantly intuit the topic and jump right in. I don't think about it and don't even notice it. When I do notice it (because I'm lost) I just tell her that I don't have any context. No problem. I'll also say that I have no idea of if or how often I do the same thing.
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoAbsolutely prefer more information. I can skim several hundred words per minute and scroll to the bottom if I already know the backstory, but if I don't, the punchline is completely useless and there's nowhere to go to find the context. The author does not know what background the reader knows or does not know, and furthermore, if your story has multiple readers their level of background knowledge is not going to be equivalent.