Robert the Bard
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Re:The focus in fiction - 08/22/2006
Character, and world development and interactions. I'm a huge Tolkien fan, and when you read his works, the story driven ones, you come away feeling as if you could feel what the chars felt. He never got overly carried away with description, but by the end of "Felloship", you knew the characters, and had a good idea how they would react to a given situation. They had become almost friends.
Another author who did that for me was Anne McCaffery, in the original Dragon Riders of Pern series. She had you feeling like you were on the field for the dragon impressions, hoping a dragon would choose you, because you knew what the bond was like. To me, these are the important characteristics. These things make the world seem real, and that you can become, or have become, a part of it.
When I say world development, I'm not talking about how many leaves are on a tree, but I want to be able to feel how "creepy" a forest is, or how friendly. I want to know how dark a cave is, but not to the point of rediculousness. I have seen discussion of authors that feel like you need to know the color and texture of the buttons on a tunic, but unless one of those buttons is pertinent to the story, I don't need, nor want to know.
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