A Singularity

Extra Credits has moved to Penny Arcade TV! And they’re still making poignant commentary on video games, and even more. Take this episode for example:

Extra Credits: Season 3: Episode 7 – Pacing

This show talks about pacing, referencing Star Wars and video games. But pacing applies to almost any medium that tells a story, including writing. The analogy talking about eating candy is perfectly correct about how people take in story elements, tone, and pacing of a story, whether they are playing it, reading it, watching it, or even play acting it. As writers and creators, we should be keeping this pacing of experience in mind.

Like criminals

“Psychologists have found out a little bit about the personalities of writers. They are individualists, skeptics, taboo-breakers, mockers, loners; they are undependable, likely to be behind on their rent; they keep irregular hours and have strange friends. Professional writers, like criminals, really live outside society: they have no regular jobs, they come and go as they please, they live by their wits.”

–Damon Knight, in the introduction to Creating Short Fiction

Stolen from: Silly Bean

Keep watching for at least 52 seconds. Then you’ll see why I posted this video.

Regardless of if you believe this video to be true or not, I wanted to point out the actual literary technique used here. I bet it has a name but I’m not sure what it is. But the primary attention grabber, the thing that makes you go ‘ooh clever!” is not the audio or video, but the words and how they are presented. The music, narration, and video are all superfluous to the words written save that they provide a structure for our society that has grown a little more dependent on video and audio for information distribution, with the exception that extraneous instruction would need to be added at the end of the paragraph to achieve effect or even more words would have to be written.

The power of words is universal and, because of it, sadly under appreciated by the people who wield them, myself included.