{"id":703,"date":"2015-07-24T10:37:31","date_gmt":"2015-07-24T17:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/?p=703"},"modified":"2015-09-25T12:24:24","modified_gmt":"2015-09-25T19:24:24","slug":"sense-is-more-important-than-accuracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/sense-is-more-important-than-accuracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Sense is More Important Than Accuracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Accuracy is overrated when it comes to portraying something in a way that makes sense to most people. Outside a research paper or an architectural drawing, you\u2019re more often looking for verisimilitude. Verisimilitude captures the essence, or appearance, of a thing. Today that means distilling it down to pertinent details rather than describing every boat in the harbor and their moorings (during the frickin climax, Dickens, wth).\u00a0I\u2019ve run across the distillation principle again and again in different contexts, so I have plenty of examples:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Writing \u2013 \u201cnatural\u201d dialogue means cutting out the fluff.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

This writing advice is common because it seems like every new writer screws it up with the idea that all their character\u2019s casual mouth dribble is worth recording in the name of \u201crealism.\u201d They start their character\u2019s statements with \u201cum\u201ds and \u201cah\u201ds and \u201cwell\u201ds. They include every hello and goodbye, as well as tons of unimportant small talk. When you directly transcribe a conversation from real life, it\u2019s full of boring crud you have to sift through to find the gold. Raymond Chandler is known for punchy dialogue because he got right down to what was interesting and left out all the worthless crap.<\/p>\n

Dialogue truncated to its interesting bits is what people mean when they call it \u201crealistic,\u201d even though it\u2019s technically not. That\u2019s because our brains edit out the unimportant shit. For example, I didn\u2019t realize how much I say, \u201cYou know\u2026\u201d as filler when I talk until I heard a recording of myself. If I put that many \u201cyou know\u201ds in a novel, people would want to throw the book at me. Hell, I wanted to chuck a shoe at myself through a time tunnel to stop myself saying, \u201cyou know\u201d so much in that interview. It was embarrassing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

World-building \u2013 don\u2019t show all your homework.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

You may have done tons of research for your story, or written reams of character backstory, but most of that doesn\u2019t have a place in the actual narrative. It may be a lot of fun trying to figure out the mechanics of gene replication in an alien with a triple-helix (guilty), but let\u2019s face it, at a certain point it becomes nothing more than intellectual wanking. If you\u2019re shoving all those details in your book, congratulations, you\u2019re now wanking in public!<\/p>\n

Spaceship diagrams are cool, I get that. I have a whole series of anatomical drawings for my aliens that I\u2019m still working on \u2013 for fun, and for my drawing portfolio. But those are supplementary materials. I won\u2019t be shoving them in my novels. (I\u2019ll shoving them in their own book someday, that you\u2019ll have to pay separately for. Stay tuned!)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Illustration \u2013 you\u2019re transmitting the idea of a thing, not the thing itself.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Illustrators have a bunch of tricks to fake perspective. In fact, we\u2019re so used to foreshortening that isometric drawings, a type of drafting where the length of every line is exact, look wonky. In less technical drawing, lines are also drawn thicker for closer objects, and may even disappear for objects on the horizon. In truth, none of those lines exist at all, but you can\u2019t draw without them (you can paint without then, but that\u2019s another thing). Cartoonist and animators push and pull their characters like putty to give them a sense of gravity and motion. They use lines for effect. None of this is \u201caccurate\u201d but without it, the movements don\u2019t look real. A caricature artist can draw a picture that looks more like the person than tracing over a photograph would achieve, through exaggerating a person\u2019s most defining features.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve recently finished a series of fantasy maps<\/a> \u2013 the floor plans of my crazy wizard, mushroom tower. They\u2019re nothing like architectural floor plans. Instead I went more for the amusement park 3D-cutaway look, because I figured that would make more sense to the people playing my mod. Even though I mostly traced 3D views from different angles, I had to make decisions about what to leave out and what to put in, along with how to connect cutaway areas so people could see how you could reach one area from another. I drew simple indicators to show what activities each room was designed for: a bed for a bedroom, a coffer for a treasury, a few trees and plants for the garden etc. Drawing every object in the room would have turned it into a jumbled mess.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3D Modeling and Environments \u2013 only the faces you see matter.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

A 3D model is a shell of an object. If a whole side is never going to be seen, there\u2019s no reason to have it at all. There\u2019s more reason to leave it out, as each polygon is going to add to the crunch time it needs to render. If you\u2019re making a model for a video game, you\u2019re even more limited because everything is rendered in real time. If you make a stack of coins that will never be pulled apart by a physics engine, you don\u2019t add the inside faces of every coin. Even if you build that stack from a single model, you delete those suckers. I\u2019ve talked about optimizing models before.<\/a><\/p>\n

The same goes for models that you\u2019ll only ever see in the distance. Some game engines change out higher resolution models for lower ones as you gain distance from them, and vise versa. It prevents every model you can see on the horizon from killing your frame rate, even if you\u2019re running it on a killer PC. Because games present an environment the player can explore, there are times when high detail is needed, and others where it\u2019s not appropriate. In my next blog post, I\u2019ll be talking about when<\/em> details matter in games and other forms of storytelling.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Accuracy is overrated when it comes to portraying something in a way that makes sense to most people. Outside a research paper or an architectural drawing, you\u2019re more often looking for verisimilitude. Verisimilitude captures the essence, or appearance, of a thing. Today that means distilling it down to pertinent details rather than describing every boat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,11,19],"tags":[31,20,28,37,36],"class_list":["post-703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-design","category-writing","tag-3-d-modeling","tag-advice","tag-drawing","tag-fiction","tag-things-that-make-you-go-duh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":728,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions\/728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}