When Stories Became Experiences

Then I Got to Control the Story

I had played Warcraft I and Warcraft II and loved them.

But if I'm being fair, I wasn't particularly obsessed with their stories. At the time, Red Alert was probably the more important strategy game for me.

Then Warcraft III arrived.

And suddenly something was different.

Until then, I had experienced fantasy mostly by reading it or watching it.

Now I was inside the story.

I wasn't just watching characters make decisions. I was moving them.

And then came Arthas.

Watching a character slowly fall is one thing.

Watching him fall while being the hands guiding him through that fall is something else entirely.

You can see what's happening. You know he's going somewhere terrible.

And the game says: Keep going.

So you do.

I wasn't just watching Arthas fall. I was helping him do it.

The ending of the Human Campaign is still burned into my memory: Arthas returning to Lordaeron, approaching his father, and that final:

“Succeeding you...”

To this day, I consider it one of the greatest cinematics ever made for a video game.

And Warcraft III is still comfortably among my top five games of all time.

“There Is No Way They Can Pull This Off.”

Then Tolkien taught me something again.

This time through cinema.

I remember watching the first trailers for The Lord of the Rings and thinking:

“No. There is no way they can do this.”

I had seen adaptations before. Books I loved. Comics I loved.

And so often I came away with the same reaction:

The version in my head was better.

Then I went to the cinema and watched The Fellowship of the Ring.

I still remember walking out afterwards and thinking:

“How did they put what was in my head on that screen?”

That experience stayed with me.

Partly because of the film itself. But partly because of the way I read.

I have always read visually.

When I'm reading a book, I build the scene in my head. If I can't visualize what's happening, I actually struggle to understand it.

I do the same thing when I write.

I see scenes.

Don't Finish the Picture for Me

Suppose a book tells me:

She's a blonde girl with blue eyes.

Fine.

She's there.

My brain has already started building her. I have a face. Hair. An expression. Probably a voice.

Now, if the author continues for another paragraph explaining the precise shape of her nose, the exact shade of blonde, her cheekbones, eyebrows, lips, and every other physical detail, one of two things tends to happen.

I skip it.

Or I read it and discover that the author's version doesn't match the person already standing in my head.

And now I'm disappointed.

The purpose of description isn't always to complete the image. Sometimes it's simply to start it.

That's one reason I've deliberately avoided excessive description in Ankhara.

I want to give readers the right pieces and then allow their imagination to do some of the work.

Maybe that's also one of the reasons comic books have always appealed to me. In a comic, the image is already there.

A book asks more from you.

A book requires you to become part of the production team.

You have to build the sets yourself.