My tastes in storytelling have changed a lot over the last few years. Up through college, I was a big fan of stories that began with exposition. Once upon a time there was a princess. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, who lived at Number 4 Privet Drive, were proud to say they were quite normal, thank you very much. I liked stories that began by taking the time to center the reader in the setting, giving them a place to view the action from that made sense. Stories that began in medias res were confusing, ungrounded; I couldn't follow the action because I was starting in the wrong place. My least favorite episode of
Firefly was the one that starts with Nathan Fillion naked and alone in a desert, and then takes half an hour to explain how he'd gotten there.
I've gotten more tolerant of in medias res these days, and I think I now get the point of it. Seeing how the main characters behave in stressful situations, even if those happen well after the ostensible beginning of the story, is as much scene-setting as is an entire chapter of straight world-building. And more and more, it's the characters that make or break a story for me, regardless of how interesting the world is.
Here's a couple of recent (for me) examples of how characters affect my experience of a story. The Geek had been trying for months to get me to read
Michelle West's Hunter's Oath, which is set in the kind of world I would love to play Dungeons and Dragons in. I could tell from the start that I would like the world. But the main characters of the first book were:
- two little boys caught up in violent sibling rivalry
- their father, who is too obsessed with their culture's norms about hunting to parent properly
- their mother, who has spent her whole life preparing for the trauma of losing her husband or one of her sons in the annual Sacred Hunt where someone always has to die to appease their god and ensure a good harvest
- their uncle, who's a supportive father-figure but dies abruptly a third of the way into the story
- some time-traveling woman with a crystal ball who keeps showing up out of order
I didn't think it was worth reading about those characters. But the Geek had found characters and moments in the sequel that he knew I
would like, and he knew the second book wouldn't make sense if I hadn't finished the first, so he started telling me about the people in the sequel that I should look forward to meeting, and eventually I decided it was worth slogging through the first book to finally meet the brilliant female politicians in the second and find out what was going on with the time traveler.
The other recent one is a shared-universe setting called
Wild Cards, where a mysterious virus has given people unpredictable, and sometimes self-destructive, superpowers. I like superhero stories that haven't been redone to death, and the diversity of people and powers in Wild Cards make it sound, on the surface, like exactly the kind of thing I'd enjoy. The problem is that 90% of the people in this universe are power-hungry assholes, and an overlapping thirty percent are traumatized victims of power-hungry assholes. Even the children with superpowers are mostly victims of human trafficking. So it's not a series I seek out. Yet
both times I've stumbled across Wild Cards stories recently, I've read them to the end in spite of how dark they get, because I care about the characters. I can't stop when the plot or setting gets dark, because I want to make sure everyone's okay.
So I think I get stories that start in the middle now, though I still get confused by stories told out of order (like China Mieville's
Embassytown, which I read this weekend and found hard to keep track of until the past timeline caught up with the beginning of the present timeline). The hook is the people, not the setting. And I've increasingly prioritized "do I want to spend time with these characters" over "do I want to spend time in this place" in choosing what I want to read.
