Roses background

Everyone has a story, but if the short course of a novel, you just can't fit everything, so what do I include, what do I just leave to the reader's imagination? Isn't that one of the big questions almost every writer poses to themself?



In the LOTR trillogy, Tolkien gives you bits of pieces of elven and human history, he gives songs, reasons for wars, reasons why this person feels this way, and so on... In one way it makes the story come alive and it helps explain to people that don't have a clue what a dwarf or elf is why the elves and dwarves are. I remember when I was reading the book for the first time, I wondered, "Is this a novel or a musical?" I really had to struggle through the first book, but once through that book, the background information really make the rest of the trillogy come alive and also gave needed information about the remainder of the series. I started another book, one of the few books I've ever simply given up on, and I literally was having to look something up in the glossary every couple sentances. I mean, it's one thing to have to figure out a word by looking at how the word is used, but with that novel, they went straight into the politics and power struggles of this person vs. that person, and their titles and heirarchy which was NOTHING like normal fuedal heirarchy... expanding your vocabulary is good, but a book where that much of the vocabulary has to be researched before getting what the author means isn't pleasurable reading for me. Then again, I don't want to mock my reader's intelligence by writing the story at a 4th grade level, but putting adult content in the book, like other series I've read a couple of books for. The balance I seek is to write a book for a common adult, somewhere in between 20 and 30. I don't want the book to be dumbed down, yet I don't want to have to have a glossary to define all of the terms I use. I want to be descriptive and imaginative and full of interesting thoughts and ideas, but not overly so, so that you about lose the plot in the description.