Possibilities for Publication continued--Place/World

Let’s continue our discussion of your SiFi/F world. You remember--the place you fashioned for your story. The place your reader escapes to--explores and marvels at your creative talent. What makes your world work for your story? Does it have snow capped mountains or hot dry wastelands, cities with glass spires or small towns with a pub, indigenous people and strange critters?

When I read a good SiFi or Fantasy book I am whisked away to a different place and time. Sometime to a different planet where I meet alien races and ride in spaceships to the outer edges of the universe. Remember the Star Wars saga with many different planets, aliens, spaceships and creatures. Each planet and alien race was described with such detail that the reader (or movie viewer) was completely drawn into the author’s world. This is your job; to draw your reader in and make him/her believe that somewhere in time and space your world exists.

One of the problems authors often encounters creating their place is too much description. Not only does it tend to slow down the story it also forces many readers to skip to the good stuff, the action, conflict and the ending. What techniques do you use? Do you draw a map first and describe the setting or blunder in sprinkling cities, people/aliens, mountains, rivers as you need them?

I use a combination of short description through the eyes of the protagonist and a term I coined called reader discovery. When my protagonist travels through my place, the reader discovers, at the same time, what my protagonist sees (point of view description). My world is not only made up of solid objects it also includes sounds, smells, colors, animals; the list goes on.

When we build our world we need to show the reader that it is different from the one he/she lives in. We tend to think in the present and as such tend to write with the same technology. Imagine an alien who lives 120,000 light years from earth using the same toaster or toilet you use back home. Not to convincing for your reader. How about using a shower, which has no doors and uses a force field to keep water inside? Now we are getting somewhere. We do not have anything like that on earth and at the same time it is believable.

I would like to hear from you. How do you build your world (place)? How is your protagonist affected by the world you have thrust him/her into?

Posibilities for Plublication

Possibilities for Publication

Welcome and thank you for reading my blog. Warning, if you become a regular reader you might get excited and begin writing Science Fiction and Fantasy (SiFi/F) novels. So who am I to write such a blog? Good question, if you ever find out please let me know. I have been searching for an answer for years.

I titled this blog Possibilities for Publication because in SiFi/F anything is possible. Wow, what a profound statement. Do you believe it? Let’s take the anything is possible phrase and talk about it. If you are writing a novel can you weave anything you think of into your story without dire consequences?

In an orderly world everything happens in a logical manner. If you write about this type of world anything you make up must meet the accepted norm for your world or your reader will not believe it. In the worlds of science fiction or fantasy the same rules apply. I do not recall Frodo from the Trilogy of the Rings ordering a hamburger. Why, because it would not fit into the world J.R.R. Tolkien created. The same logic must apply to anything you or I write. The phrase anything is possible is correct as long as your SiFi or fantasy world permits it. The good news is that you are the world’s creator. This puts a heavy responsibility on you.

The science fiction or fantasy world you dream of for your novel must be constructed using your descriptive words. Now I will date myself. Many of you will not remember the days of radio. Yes those days of yesteryear without TV or Mp3 players. Radio programs brought all of our entertainment into the house. I remember the advertisements some of which made my mouth water. Coca-Cola comes to mind. The announcer would talk about the product and at the same time open a bottle (yes we had glass bottles) next to his microphone. The sound of the liquid splashing over ice cubes was enough to make me rush to the refrigerator and grab…you guessed it, a Coke. Now apply this same principle to your descriptive writing when you describe your novels world and you will have the reader turning page after page. A good exercise would be to take the above Coca-Cola scene and put it into words.

Your job, should you accept it, is to create a place (another word for world) that allows your readers to escape to and believe all of it. Another question is what makes up a place? We will discuss this next.