On the other hand, the other frequent criticism I get of my fiction is
that my stories lack a sense of place; I tend not to describe the
settings in which my action takes place. The problem, generally, is that I
don't know how to work the descriptions in. It always seems as though
describing the scene will interupt the action. Obviously, I don't have
this problem in IF, because there is a set of well-established
conventions that determines when you describe the physical objects at
hand.
Thinking about this has made me curious about my fellow IF writers. Do
you tend to write in other forms, too? Do you find your strengths and
weaknesses in one form are analogous to those in another form? Does
writing in one form make you a better author in the other? Are you a
programmer who thinks of IF as just another kind of programming, or a
writer who thinks of IF as just another kind of writing?
-Jacob