Tag: storytelling

The ZIRPification Of Lore

Ah, the ZIRPification of lore. A term as potent as it is unsettling, conjuring a realm where backstory becomes a suffocating miasma, a narrative equivalent of quantitative easing run amok. Just as central banks distort markets with artificially low interest rates, excessive lore warps the very fabric of a story.

Imagine, dear reader, a text bogged down by expositionary bloat. Pages upon pages dedicated to the minutiae of dynastic squabbles in a forgotten corner of the fictional universe, or the precise lineage of a minor magical artifact. This is the ZIRPification at work, where every detail, no matter how trivial, is deemed worthy of inclusion.

The consequences are dire. The reader, bombarded with an unending stream of irrelevant information, drowns in the narrative swamp. What should be a thrilling adventure becomes a Sisyphean struggle to reach the next plot point, buried beneath layers of world-building detritus.

The ZIRPification breeds a peculiar kind of cynicism. The reader, forever wary of the info-dump lurking around the corner, becomes suspicious of any expository passage. Trust in the narrative erodes, replaced by a constant questioning of the author’s motives. Is this detail truly relevant, or merely another desperate attempt to inflate the world’s perceived complexity?

But the true horror lies in the erosion of mystery. ZIRPification robs the world of its tantalizing ambiguity. Every question, no matter how minor, receives a definitive answer. The thrill of piecing together the narrative puzzle oneself is replaced by the dispiriting feeling of having everything spoon-fed.

However, there’s a glimmer of hope. Perhaps the ZIRPification isn’t a dead end, but a grotesque caricature, a cautionary tale. By pushing the boundaries of overstuffed lore to their breaking point, it exposes the delicate balance between world-building and narrative flow.

The truly skilled author navigates this treacherous terrain. They understand that lore, like spice, should be used judiciously. Hints and whispers, revealed organically through the narrative, are far more potent than pages of dry exposition. The reader becomes an active participant, piecing together the world one tantalizing clue at a time.

Never Re-enact the Sleight

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Junky marks fiending for their next astonishment fix – reality a banal husk without that sweet frisson of the impossible injected straight into their vapid cerebral veins. Illusionists carters of a paradox narcotic more addictive than horse, hovering on that razor edge where certainty splinters apart into horrific/ecstatic chimerae.

Watching junkies ride convulsive K-waves as ingested miracles momentarily short-circuit Reason’s monopoly over the aperture through which experiential data streams. For a nanosecond the Symbolic Order yawns apart, offering fleeting glimpse of that awful primordial abyss underlying consensus reality’s thin cinematic veneer. Sick junkies helplessly crave repeat hit of that brain-tearing epiphany…

But showman’s dictum: NEVER RE-ENACT THE SLEIGHT. Let deckled imagination bloom in prolific soil of that gaping plot-hole. Starve marks of facile resolution, force their free-associating psyches to claw labyrinthine paths through mysteries’ dank recesses… each obsessive explication mutating ever deeper into alien terra enigma.

Identity’s bedrock eroding beneath relentless onslaught of speculative catechism – self sloughing into hieroglyphs scrawled across damp dungeon walls by forgotten cults. Abysmal hunger awakened can never be sated, merely ascending dizzying spiral of empties hungering for emptier empties…the soul winnowed to husk encasing husk encasing hOLLOWNESS.

So inject paradox’s exquisite gangrene, then let poisoned imaginations fester. Inscribe the enigma, swaddle it in Burroughsian mystery, THEN WALK AWAY…allowing obsession to deliquesce all sutured certainties in purple dissolving flames of unanswerable riddle.