He recently posted a link to Charles Akin's Dyvers Blog which was ostensibly about describing things in RPGs using terse language. The rule of thumb for maintaining people's attention is about three sentences, and Charles touches upon that rule when he says:
One of my strengths as a GM has always been my ability to describe the locations that my players explore with a brevity that leaned heavy on mood and the big details.
Kevyn drags this back to narrative fiction:
Yet another brick in the Pulp edifice elucidated. This is critical I think, in getting the aesthetic heart of pulp style fiction right, and is something many authors aiming for "pulpiness" fail to grasp. Yes, the vocabulary may be rich, there may also be lovingly lingering description, but the skill with which the best pulp era authors paint scenes in a handful of sentences is amazing.Anyone who has read my work knows that I favor that level of terseness in my descriptions. But that's not why I'm telling you about Kevyn today. We got to talking about pulp writing and - aside from feeling like one of those late-night dorm room speculative conversations - it really opened my eyes to a few trends. In particular, Spence Hart chimed in with this idea bomb:
I don't think it's a coincidence that a fair amount of us starting up the Pulp Revolution come from a background in RPGs... specifically the OSR movement. We've already been through rejecting what the gatekeeper publishers were trying to force-feed us and went back to older-style games, then after a period of re-acquaintance building on the old games into new directions.It gets better. Click here and read the whole thing.
You see that thread? That's what I call writing advice. That's what I call literary criticism. That's what I call, "The Good Stuff".