I have been playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas again. If you don't know it, it is a videogame set in a fictionalised American state that is a portmanteau of California and Nevada and the game is one amazing bit of design even today, mere months away from being two generations of console technology removed from its release and I am still finding new things to see in it. It was succeeded by Grand Theft Auto 4, a game I have yet to sit down and finish because it is pretty unambitious and banal in comparison, stripping away all the things that the series had logically progressed towards in order to create "realism", which I find hilarious because "realism" is a band aid no game outside pc flight simulators really wants to go picking at.
I suppose I have been thinking about verisimilitude in various ways, but this is the one that grabs me the most if I think of where the pursuit of realism gets in the way of things, and having to sit down and write an all-ages story that is theoretically set in "reality" without getting bogged down in the details, I really hate that I can't just throw exposition at the page and call it dialogue even though it's a necessary evil because it's just the kind of thing that takes me out of a story and I work from the assumption that the reader is at least as smart as I am and if I wouldn't buy it then they probably won't either.
And it is blimming crippling me, here - how do writers at the CW just churn this shit out like they don't give a fuck? They're amazing people. They have to be.
Anyway, dialogue is hard, is what I am saying.
