Ancestors

Written by Owlor on 2025-01-30 at 10:31

A stumbling block I've seen in ARG writing is that they'll sometimes go for this tone of tantalizing vagueness in situations where a realistic document really wouldn't.

I was reading one ARG site that styles itself as a gallery for cartoon lost media, and in a couple of cases it hints vaguely at an attempted movies "disastrous production history" without really elaborating and that would've been my main tell that it's fiction.

If this was something that actually happened, there would have been a whole bunch of very specific things that happened that this blog could have elaborated on. It's hard to imagine a movie having a tumultuous production history without SOME juicy details you could spill.

In our reality, all the details of a case would exist, relevant to the story or not and it'd be up to the person writing things down to decide which details they need to include, but in a fictional narrative, none of those details exist unless you decide to write it.

And that means there's kind of a 'grain' towards vagueness, you prolly wouldn't create details until they are relevant to the story, or if you do write those details, you're prolly gonna be tempted to include them somewhere, whether they add to the story or not.

I can think of two ways to mitigate this:

One that doesn't work in all contexts but can be very effective when it does is to find the closest real-world equivalent to what you're trying to describe and fictionalize it. Pull a lot of details from the real history and tweak them just enough to fit your story.

This sounds lazy, but honestly in practice it mostly just becomes a fun easter egg when, say, a medieval historian reads your book and are like "wait a minute, this sounds a lot like the wars of the roses!"

The second is to get into the habit of writing a bunch of stuff you're not planning on using. This method is dangerous cus like... you'll end up having the rough outline to at least five sequels before you've concluded the main story and that can feel a bit overwhelming.

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Written by Owlor on 2025-01-30 at 13:09

The ARG I was reading was https://pendogcreativelibrary.org/ , although to be fair, for the most part it's actually really good about providing details that help with verisimilitude, they even do the thing I describe a couple of times where they take an episode from the biography of a real-world public figure and fictionalizes it to the point where it becomes its own thing.

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Toot

Written by Owlor on 2025-01-30 at 13:20

In retrospect, it's not a good example of what I'm talking about at all, there was one article that kinda glossed over the production details of a failed movie, but that's mostly cus it's covered in details elsewhere.

There's even one article that's a really good example of including details that make the description of a failed movie project specifically feel more real:

"The conditions were notably horrible with several actors and actresses passing out on the set due to the stress. Several props caught on fire, one of the actors was poisoned by aluminum dust, and multiple writers quit mid-production."

So yeah, at this case, it was really only the one article that was omitting details for brevity's sake and it's not an actual example of the issue I was gesturing at.

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Descendants