Actually figuring out what ordinary people know is a hell of a trick.
I sometimes ask things in my LJ specifically to assess how much I need to ground things. For instance, for Ha'Penny, I asked whether I'd need to explain habeus corpus and the responses I got made it perfectly plain that I would have to explain it far more than I'd imagined was necessary.
When I am talking to someone, if I want to talk about something I can stop and ask them where I need to start from, I either know that they already know about X, or I can ask. For instance, I have a gorgeous button that is a view of Europa in false blues that beamjockey gave me, and when fans ask me what it is, I say that, and if non-fans, I expand to "Europa, the moon of Jupiter". But when you're writing you have to make assumptions -- you can assume an SF reading audience knows Europa, but when it comes to history, what do they know? You can't hope for the precise degree of information you want to connect on.
I once wanted to run an alternate history RPG about the Catiline Conspiracy, for which I needed a group of players who knew a bit about the Catiline Conspiracy. I didn't want people who'd never heard of it or Cicero experts, I wanted people who had a vague notion of when it was and how it went so they knew approximately who people were and where things were going off the rails. I never got to run it.
Heck, I wrote The Prize in the Game because I'd mis-assessed how much intelligent rasfw readers, as represented by you, knew about the Tain.
no subject
I sometimes ask things in my LJ specifically to assess how much I need to ground things. For instance, for Ha'Penny, I asked whether I'd need to explain habeus corpus and the responses I got made it perfectly plain that I would have to explain it far more than I'd imagined was necessary.
When I am talking to someone, if I want to talk about something I can stop and ask them where I need to start from, I either know that they already know about X, or I can ask. For instance, I have a gorgeous button that is a view of Europa in false blues that
I once wanted to run an alternate history RPG about the Catiline Conspiracy, for which I needed a group of players who knew a bit about the Catiline Conspiracy. I didn't want people who'd never heard of it or Cicero experts, I wanted people who had a vague notion of when it was and how it went so they knew approximately who people were and where things were going off the rails. I never got to run it.
Heck, I wrote The Prize in the Game because I'd mis-assessed how much intelligent rasfw readers, as represented by you, knew about the Tain.