This is a difficult post to write. This is because it would be so easy to misunderstand my reason for writing it. Allow me to say that if it should occur to the reader that the reason why a person chooses not to read a book; or thinks to include a given book among their favourites; or fails to understand why some book is far better than they judge it to be, that I'm saying its because some person is stupid ... let me clearly state that this is NOT what I'm saying. People read books because they have a reason to do so. They like specific books because of their overall experience with books, and because some particular book speaks to them. They dislike books not only because a book is "bad," but also because a book tells a story in a way that is unappealing ... and that is often because the book is difficult to read. Books are not enjoyable when they're a trial; but the difficulty anyone has in reading a book comes from the number of books that they've read. It's not necessarily a fault in the book itself.
For example, War and Peace is a very long book, with a complex narrative, containing many characters, which occurs in an unfamiliar time and an unfamiliar place, and handles themes that are themselves alien to many people in the present. For this reason, for many people who don't choose to read a lot of books, who therefore haven't spent a lot of time reading books, War and Peace is difficult to read ... and therefore, not enjoyable. But for those who have read a lot of books, and are familiar with books of the same time period, and related to the same culture, then in fact War and Peace is rather easy to read. The gentle reader now may compare one's capacity to enjoy War and Peace with one's capacity to hit a 92-mile-an-hour fastball. If we've been raised to play baseball, and we like baseball, so that we want to play baseball all the time, then once we've matured into a decent player it's not so difficult to hit a fastball for us, as it would be for many other people. Think of War and Peace like that.
To speak for myself, I was raised in a home with more than 2,000 books, a great many of which were classic fiction from the 18th and 19th centuries, along with hundreds of technical and scientific textbooks. I was also a child when television, for me, consisted of three channels, when home computers did not exist, when children were seen and not heard, and were not given money to see movies, and their interests were not considered when the television was turned on. Therefore I had much time to read.
Moreover, of my own accord, I chose to be a writer, to spend a lot of my time writing, to fantasise that one day I'd be a famous writer, and for this reason I had cause to be a good writer. Therefore, I spent a lot of time reading about being a writer, and practicing being a better writer and talking about writing with friends and teachers. It would be natural, therefore, that I would accumulate more information about writing, and read more books, with an eye towards gleaning all there was to know about those books, for no other reason than that I passionately wanted this to be my profession.
This doesn't make me smarter. It doesn't make other people, who did not fervently pursue writing, stupid. It does not do, however, to merely say that my experience with books is merely subjective, and therefore no better than the subjective opinion of any other person; nor is it wise to say that we simply all possess a diversity of reading experiences, and that just because I happen to think a book is good, that doesn't make the book better than what another person thinks is a good book. To wit: I can hit a "fastball." Many others, for whatever reason, and certainly not due to incapacity, but because they have not taken the time to educate themselves about this specific field, or even care to have done so, cannot. Not because they're stupid ... but because they had other interests.
If you're still with me, let's consider the process of assigning a book to a classroom of 16-year-old children. Much consideration goes into which title to choose. The book not only has to amuse those in the class who have spent much of their childhoods reading, but also those who have done a modicum of reading, and those who have done almost no reading at all. An appropriate title is sure to be something like To Kill a Mockingbird, though that didn't used to be a popular title in Canada. Other examples are Animal Farm, Catcher in the Rye or Lord of the Flies. A particularly ambitious teacher might propose 1984. As I remember it in my past, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, most chose Animal Farm in the hopes that it would encourage the student to read 1984 on their own.
If we imagine such a book being given to 30 students, it's reasonable to argue that about 10 won't finish the book, or indeed read it at all. In these cases, these students most likely haven't any history of reading. They didn't grow up in a house with books, they weren't read to by their parents, they didn't obtain good reading habits early and much of their background is affected by the way in which television deals with stories. It's not that these 10 are stupid, or even that they wouldn't get something meaningful out of To Kill a Mockingbird ... it's only that they don't know how to hit that fastball, so they either try and miss, or they don't try.
Next we have a middle 10 students who read the book with various levels of discomfort. This section represents those students who diligently read all they've been given to read since school began, and therefore have a collection of school-assigned books to their credit. They know how to read, and they can do so if they have to, but they rarely have to. These students then grow older and talk sometimes about the books they read in school ... and are sure to identify that lexicon as the best books should someone take a survey. Among the thirty or forty books these people have read, Catcher in the Rye is the best book that's ever been written. For what they know, maybe it is.
The next 6 are those people who read regularly, who are familiar with the assigned text but just haven't gotten around to reading it. In general, these people have read more than a hundred books, though many of these fit the category of "light" reading, which we can tentatively classify, for the moment, as plot-driven novels with emotion-driven characters doing things that are either romantic, extravagant or action-packed. I'll forego giving titles. Well-trained in reading, this group quickly manages the assigned book and either enjoys it, or reasonably considers it not to their taste. Because this group does read books on their own, for pleasure, they have read enough to decide which flavour of book they like.
Of the remaining 4 in our classroom, most of all have already read the assigned book. Often, this happens because the same book was assigned at another school, or in another grade, but let's assume that because these four are avid readers, who read upwards of 40 to 100 books a year, it's more likely that they've read the book because they're older sibling did, and the book was lying around. Prior to the class, and the discussion in class, they've made up their own minds about what the book says, or why it was written, and there's a good chance they disagree with the teacher.
It's important to note that the teacher, however, probably hates the book, and not just because they've had to teach the same book to three different classes every year for the last 15 years. The teacher has to follow an assigned syllabus that specifies what the teacher is supposed to say about the book, regardless of what the teacher might believe. Often, if a teacher has any opportunity to teach some other book, that they haven't been able to teach before, they'll grab it. This is the reason why I did not study Romeo and Juliet in Grade 10, like everyone else. Our class studied Julius Caesar.
Yes, plays are books.
Where do I fit in the classification above? Most often, in the did not read it category. I learned early that I could achieve either a B or A- grade on a book I hadn't read so long as I wrote my reports according to some basic rules, based on the first 5 and the last 5 pages of a book, plus a visit to the library (where I was all the time) to read someone else's opinion. This technique served me very well right up through university, though only in my English literature classes. In Classics, there's no way to get around reading the book.
To this day, I've never actually read Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye. Yet I've had hundreds of arguments about these books and never been caught out. This is the first time I've publicly confessed to this dearth in my education.
Please don't write to make a query in the hopes that I'll answer. The reason I haven't read these books is because the premise, as I understand it, sounds just awful. Really, racism is awful and the frightening freakish boy next door is harmless? You don't say.
My point to all this, to bring the reader on board with me, is to make a point about D&D. Obviously. But this is a big barn, and we're still walking around it.
Enjoining some ad hoc terms that have no application outside this post, let me start with a definition for "Story," a word I'm using for convenience and not in relation to any actual definition for the term. A "story" (don't forget, a matter of convenience, Best Beloved) is a narrative that is plot-centric, in which a series of events are related one after another. Chronological order isn't important. Essentially, a story is a device in which the writer relates the plot's beats in this manner: "and then ... and then ... and then ... and then." We went here, we fought that, we went there, we talked to him, we went there, we lost the fight, we ran away, we went here, we talked to her ..." and so on. Nearly all of the narrative is taken up with events.
When most people talk about creating a "story" for D&D, this is what they mean. A story works well in a video game format, because even if the game has a dramatic component, all the actual beats of the story depend on a computer's "if ... then" format. If you say this to the girl, then she'll say that. If you go here, then this will happen. This framework fills about 95% of all the books that have ever been written, because it's easier to write a narrative whose focus is primarily what happened.
This doesn't mean that a "story" can't be a fine read, or even elaborate in structure. I would consider Lord of the Rings or Asimov's Foundation Series to fit into this structure. Asimov himself would be the first to argue this, and did often in essays he wrote.
Let's move on. Our next definition is for an "Account" — which I'll use as a shorthand for a "character-driven" narrative. These stress interactions between characters and the motivations of the characters rather than a series of events. Funny thing; while looking about for a satisfactory term, the example list of accounts that I was given matched exactly the list I've already made above, for books assigned in school. Coincidence? No, obviously not. Nearly everyone has either read, or sat in a class for a time, in which these books figured highly. If we make an example of books, it's best to choose titles that most everyone's heard of.
A writer relates the account's beats in this manner: "he thought, she said, he felt, she wanted, she wanted ..." What is thought or said or felt makes up the narrative, and from this the reader is meant to identify and related to the things being thought or heard or felt. There's obviously nothing wrong with this. It's difficult, however, to apply an account to D&D in any meaningful way, since the game depends greatly on what the players DO and not what the players feel. Still, it's possible to encourage the players to feel things, and much saying and thinking is certainly involved in the game. Unfortunately, nearly every attempt to "can" a meaningful account into a D&D adventure ends up producing a terribly maudlin, hackneyed, often laughable result, such that players are moved towards sarcasm and mockery rather than real emotion.
It's at this point that I'm going to step off a ledge. It's a pretty high ledge, and there are pointy rocks below, but this is how writing can be. The goal is to convey an idea that's hardly appreciated in literature discussions or classes, perhaps because of it's subtlety and perhaps because so few have read enough books to glean out what it is. Generally, most discussions of books run to the theme of a book, or it's message, or the finer points of the character's interaction, or those incidents that remain with so precious to the reader that we're compelled to return to the book, to read it again.
This post is inspired by thoughts I had last night while listening to the audiobook version of A Tale of Two Cities, which even my daughter, who eats books like Les Miserables for breakfast, considers a fastball too hard to hit. This is something like my third time, not counting the dozen times or so I read an abridged version of the book that was in my elementary school library.
I contend that the book is firmly about redemption. As I go through it again, I hear proof of this in every chapter. I won't elaborate ... it would take too long. Suffice to say that each little glimmer that I encounter seems to fill me with a rather fine bit of pleasure.
I chose to listen to the book because, for reasons difficult to explain, I finished a 47-hour sojourn through Stephen King's The Stand. Which is, by writing standards, a comic book. King, as is his habit, spends an inordinate amount of time repeating details about the characters and about things that have happened to the characters in an aggressive, sometimes aggravating fashion. He cannot make the least little reference to an event, or something a character said, without taking another three sentences to remind when it was said, where it was said, and why it was said. There are no "glimmers" in King's works. He whacks away with a hammer at a bell and calls it music.
The shift to Dickens is jarring. Dickens says a great deal but never anything twice. We are meant to parse every phrase, every word. I find that as I listen, a revelation in the text will rush out at me that applies to the whole book, but doesn't especially apply to this scene. There are characters who are affected, but these moments of revelation are not about what the characters think or say. They're not about what has happened, or will happen. They're about, in this particular case, redemption. The process itself of being lifted out of misery or confusion into a better place, even if only for a moment or two.
However, the specificity of the "Nugget" described is of no importance here. It's the nature of the nugget itself; that at various points of the narrative, something is said that elaborates on the matter at hand in a way that causes me to stop and review the author's intent, rather than continuing to read the book. It's as though the author has just served an exquisite cut of meat in a deeply rich sauce, and before I can move onto the next course, I have to digest what's been said first. It's much more rewarding that merely identifying with some character undergoing a struggle that I've also undergone. It's far more compelling that seeing people go somewhere and do surprising things.
Yet I'm quite sure, quite sure, that most people have never experienced this "nugget" business while reading a book. Not, as I say, because they're "stupid." But because, I think, one must read a lot of books before finding it easy to read the sort of book that does this. War and Peace, for example, does this quite a bit.
All this serves to make this very relevant point, however. I think that Dungeons and Dragons does this.
As events unfold, in game, as part of the narrative both in the story and account sense, there are also narrative nuggets that cause players to stop, take a step back and say, "Whoa." This can be any number of things. The set of coincidences that are driven by random numbers, which can get freaky at times. The startling moment of inspiration that one player has when threading a needle through some situation that seems the party cannot get out of. The sudden comprehension that if A is true, B must be, which somehow seems to shake the pillars of the universe.
Have you had that? Sometimes, D&D can function like a strange, narrative Ouiji board, with multiple persons pushing the events from here to there, painting out consequences or conundrums that would cross a rabbi's eyes.
And aren't they wonderful?
I think this is an intrinsic, unspoken reason why we play ... for the reason that often during play, we think of things, or do things, that seemingly come out of nowhere, in ways that defy our normal train of feelings and sense of chronological order. It takes a very good writer to fit these moments into a narrate ... a better writer than me. But I do just fine when I run D&D. Stuff like this seems to pop out everywhere.
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