Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction
Description
When creating your story’s setting or explaining what your characters are doing, you’ll need to use description. Description is necessary to move along the plot, to create tone. You even can create resonance in your writing by layering description with symbolic meaning – but more on that later.
When describing a landscape, character or action, you’ll need to appeal to one or more of the senses that people use to perceive the world. There are five senses (examples are from Gregory Benford’s short story “On the Brane”):
n Sight - What we can see with our eyes, as in “Counter was dim but grayly grand – lightly banded in pale pewter and salmon red, save where the shrunken Moon cast its huge gloomy shadow.”
n Sound - What we can hear, as in “The lander went ping and pop with thermal stress.”
n Smell - The scent of something, as in “As Keegan pressed a fin against the body tube, the scent of yellow glue strong in his nostrils, his uncle stopped talking midsentence, then a thump against the workshop floor sounded behind him.” (Note: This example doesn’t come from Benford; his story, as good as it was, skimped on this sense).
n Touch - What we can feel when things come into contact with our skin, as in “Their drive ran red-hot.”
n Taste - The flavor of something when it comes into contact with our tongue, as in “She took a hit of the thick, jolting Colombian coffee in her mug.”Using as many of the senses as possible makes a scene more real. In everyday life, we experience all of these five senses at all times. Sitting in coffee shop writing this entry, I see the barista racing to and fro to fill an order, hear the hushed voices of the couple sitting behind me as they try to keep their disagreement for bursting into a public scene, taste the bitter coffee, catch a whiff of the pear-scented perfume of a woman passing my table on her way to the counter, shiver at the cold breeze from the air conditioner that is working on overdrive. In fiction, the key is to make these different senses work with one another to create tone.
When writing description, follow these guidelines:
n Make sure it serves a purpose - Any description should move along the plot, help develop characters and dramatic tension. If it’s solely being used to establish the location of the story or to indicate a background character’s actions, keep the description quick and simple.
n Avoid flowery prose simply for the sake of waxing poetic - Purple prose only makes the story campy.
n Remain cautious about offering lengthy descriptions - Descriptions in novels obviously can be longer than those in short stories. Still, the longer the description, the greater the chance that it will cause the reader to forget what’s going on in the story.n Capture the “essence” of a place/moment/character through description - If an alien landscape is supposed to be foreboding, then describe it as such by noting the lack of water, the difficult terrain, the strange outcroppings of rock. A foreboding environment would not be lush and comfortably warm.
n Use sensory details rather than internalized ones - Sensory details (green, tart, quiet, rough) are specific rather than general. Internalized details (happy, melancholy, guilty, barbaric) amount to editorializing and give no real impression of what is being described.
You Do It
Imagine a scene in which the character in your story lands on an exoworld and visits an alien city. Write 200 words describing how your character perceives the city. Use at least four of the five senses in your description.