12 July 2007

irritants, annoyances & nuisances

Hurray! I just read a very good submission to Electric Spec. The author created a fully-realized world complete with irritants, annoyances & nuisances.

In more general terms, in my personal opinion, it's these petty problems that make a story seem real. For example a SF writer a couple centuries ago might imagine a car, but a good writer could imagine parking lots. And an excellent writer might imagine traffic jams, road rage, and insert-annoyance-here. :)

Illustrating this point is a REALLY good novella, Mr. Boy by James Patrick Kelly, in The Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels by Gardner Dozois. Talk about imagining irritants, annoyances & nuisances! Talk about a fully-realized world! Wow. I highly recommend this book, by the way.

What irritants, annoyances & nuisances exist in the worlds you create?

1 comment:

Bernita said...

Blackflies, for one...