Reasons for Reading, Watching, Gaming

Originally, I was going to title this post "Why I Read," but the reasons are as applicable to watching films and playing RPGs--the activities of imagination, whether feeding it or exercising it.

I love good dialogue between characters. Elmore Leonard is king, with Tarantino a close second. Joss Whedon has a good ear for conversation too--witty and smart.

I love interesting characters, whether they be stylish variants of types/archetypes, or fully fleshed. (As an aside, many fans demand fully realized characters. Funnily enough, I've discovered that these same fans, when reading outside their favorite genres, call the characters two-dimensional and cardboard, then apply different standards to their favorite genres, in which their favorite characters are really little more than recognizable variants of types with very little covering the skeletons.)

I love well-done plots, whether simple, intricate, or outrageous--doesn't matter, so long as the author paces it well and ties it up skillfully.

But more than anything else, I want something that excites my sense of wonder. What I look for is something akin to what C.S. Lewis called experiencing Joy. It's as if there's this X-shaped hole, and I've stumbled across something that fits that hole perfectly, like a puzzle piece. That's my sense of wonder.

"It's about, as Alan Moore put it, 'mad and beautiful ideas'; the sense of wonder, the feeling of marvelous secret things just beyond our field of vision, and the revelations and splendours and dangers and bastards tied up in it all."
~ Warren Ellis

I want the mad ideas. Take Michael Moorcock for example. Moorcock regularly rattles off a hundred brief, beautiful, brilliant, shining mad ideas on every page of his works. Many authors would take any one of those ideas and try to craft an entire novel around it--Hell, an entire series. Moorcock, on the other hand, dispenses these ideas like candy, tossing them out to his fans, with the side effect of making his worlds that much brighter, that much more wondrous, suggesting vast gulfs of adventure, intrigue, horror, discovery, and beauty.

And mad ideas aren't the same thing as so-called "big" ideas. I've seen far too many of these "big" ideas as the focus of many novels, particularly science fiction novels, and they can't carry the novels by themselves. The idea can be something small, and precious, and bright, an author's unique combination of the most common tropes. But that combination somehow hits the "turbo" button on my imagination, and I'm daydreaming and wide-eyed, with a big goofy grin or a sly smile.

And that's what I want.