The idea for this post came up mid-conversation with @neuranne when I was telling her about how inspired I was by an audio essay @ronenv spoke for me about the history of TV. Ronen spoke for at least an hour telling a very compelling story about the history of media, some of the major players involved, the moves that were made, and so on. And what was striking to me was how much I enjoyed reading it, even though some details were fuzzy since he was speaking off the top of his head (Was it Sony or Paramount that bought the Alamo Drafthouse? What was the name of the guy who wrote The Wire? David… something.) It didn’t bother me in the slightest as a listener/reader that not all the details were perfect. There were so many good details as it is. And, as I was telling Anne-Laure, if I wanted to know the details, I could look them up.
We both laughed about it a bunch in the context of our conversation, which will be hard for me to recreate from memory, but basically the point was that as authors and creators it’s so easy for us to preemptively get hung up about getting all of the details right. And sometimes it’s tempting to start doing more research, and then to overwhelm the reader with all of what we’ve learned from all our research.
Here I’m reminded of one of the best things I’ve ever read about writing, via excellent science writer @CarlZimmer:
Zimmer’s point, as I understand it, is that you simply don’t have enough time and space to tell readers everything about something. Even if you did somehow manage to stuff everything into something, you’d make it incomprehensible in the context of the reading experience. No book can be a substitute for a more comprehensive education.
If you want to know exactly what Zimmer said, you can look it up. It’s in the tweet linked above. It might occasionally make sense for me to repeat the entire quote verbatim, but in this particular moment it’s not all that important.
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I expect to update this post with more notes over time as I find excuses to tell people, even myself, that you can look it up. I’m not precisely sure yet what this post wants to be. There are many angles to the phrase, and I’ll write the angles as they come up. I could see myself using it encouragingly, to tell someone that they have the power to look things up. Currently I’m more interested in the second-order effect, which is that you don’t have to present everything in a world where readers can look things up.
I might throw in a quick note about the writing in the video game The Witcher 3, which I found enjoyable, because the world feels very lived-in, in that characters are often having conversations talking about things without necessarily over-explaining them to you, the player. If you want to know more (both “you as the player when you’re playing Witcher 3”, and “you the reader of this blogpost if you don’t know what The Witcher 3 is”), you can look it up!
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