When you\u2019re writing there\u2019s always the choice between the easy description and the difficult one.<\/p>\n
Media is so pervasive today that almost any idea brings forth an image.\u00a0 If I start describing action on the bridge of a starship, many people will accept very limited description because the mind often jumps to the bridge of the Enterprise on one of the Star Trek series, or some other recent tv or movie ship\u2019s bridge.\u00a0 If I refer to a character as an orc, again the mind jumps and I\u2019m seeing one of those handsome critters from the Lord of the Rings.\u00a0 I could offer numerous examples, but I think you get the point.\u00a0 The problem is this makes for lazy writing and lazy reading.<\/p>\n
It makes for lazy reading because the reader has to put in little effort to picture what\u2019s going on.\u00a0 You might get \u201cI loved it!\u201d on Goodreads, but I\u2019d bet dollars to donuts that within a week your book will be forgotten by the same reader who \u201cloved it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It makes for lazy writing because once you\u2019ve established the setting without much effort, all you need to do is toss in some snappy, if clich\u00e9d, dialogue, add a cup of action scenes and a pinch of stock characters (possibly Klingons) and a viola<\/em>! You have a novel.<\/p>\n I\u2019m just not interested in taking that route.<\/p>\n Truthfully, when we start to picture scenes or events in a novel, we generally delve into past experience \u2013 our memories of places or things \u2013 to start.\u00a0 Now, to be fair, most of us have never stood on the bridge of a real starship, or wandered through an ancient wood or castle with an all-knowing wizard at our side, but we do have the memories of those movies.\u00a0 Okay, so use those as a starting place and then move on.<\/p>\n In a novella I\u2019m working on, \u201cAnd The Last Shall Be First\u201d, the story takes places on a generation ship \u2013 it\u2019s on a forty year voyage.\u00a0 Forty years is a long time.\u00a0 What do you do to keep the crew at least reasonably sane?\u00a0 Well one thing that might help is the environment.\u00a0 In most stories you walk along corridors in the ship that are gray or white or whatever.\u00a0 It struck me that wouldn\u2019t do much for the mental health of the crew, so I decided to play around.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a scene where two of the characters leave an office:<\/p>\n The office door slid open and the two stepped out onto a glowing white path through the blazing reds and yellows of a northern temperate forest in early autumn.<\/p>\n \u201cExplain to me one more time why this failure wasn\u2019t critical,\u201d asked the Prime, changing the subject as he turned right along the path.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, we\u2019ve kept the program running in a dummy mode — it\u2019s actually not running anything.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been gauging the rate of decay and, barring a sudden catastrophic failure, it looks like it would take about five or six weeks to reach the point where the shield fluctuation would be dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBarring a sudden catastrophic failure,\u201d mumbled Koeberl.\u00a0 \u201cYou have such a great way of reassuring me.\u201d<\/p>\n The engineer started to laugh, but suddenly cut it off with an oath.\u00a0 A large gray wall panel had suddenly appeared at the edge of the glowing path.<\/p>\n \u201cDamn!\u201d muttered DeShay.\u00a0 \u201cThese panels were guaranteed by the manufacturer to be good for at least twice the length of our voyage.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBarring a sudden catastrophic failure,\u201d suggested the Prime.<\/p>\n DeShay shot him a pinch-faced, evil look.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019ll have Naguchi look at it immediately. Might just be a bad connection.\u201d<\/p>\n So what does this scene do?\u00a0 Well, first off it tells the reader about the holo-technology used throughout the ship, but then it also shows that things are far from perfect, or as promised. The use of holo-technology makes sense from my viewpoint because plopping people into a steel box for forty years would strike me as almost guaranteeing mental strain (or breakdown) for at least some of the passengers.\u00a0 Be that as it may, I hope it makes things different and more interesting for the reader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When you\u2019re writing there\u2019s always the choice between the easy description and the difficult one. Media is so pervasive today that almost any idea brings forth an image.\u00a0 If I start describing action on the bridge of a starship, many people will accept very limited description because the mind often jumps to the bridge of…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[7,8,23,6,26,12],"class_list":["entry","post","publish","author-photophoosk100","post-279","format-standard","category-jotting-and-stray-thoughts","category-musings","post_tag-getting-published","post_tag-novel","post_tag-science-fiction","post_tag-writing","post_tag-writing-a-novel","post_tag-writing-inspiration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/259"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":280,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions\/280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}