Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction
White room syndrome
Establishing the setting at the beginning of a story is no easy task. Imagining a science fiction world involves thinking about every aspect of how it differs from ours in sights, sounds, scents and even tastes and feel.
Rather than fully imagine such a world, some writers instead create a quick, unformed facsimile of their own. For example, they start the story with the line, “She awoke in a white room”. The white room is the white piece of paper facing the author. This is known as “white room syndrome”, a term coined a few year ago at the Turkey City Workshop in Austin (a group that has included authors William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker and Walter Jon Williams).
They officially define white room syndrome as “an authorial imagination inadequate to the situation at end, most common at the beginning of a story”. In short, because the science fiction world wasn’t fully imagined, it can’t support the story that unfolds from it.
Sometimes this occurs because a writers’ inspiration for the story is from a setting in which he found himself. If the writer takes some extra time to think about and develop this world, however, such inspiration can be put to good effect. This is the case in the non science fiction story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
White room syndrome also can occur because some writers believe that they should simply start writing and let the world evolve from there, a la the Beat writers’ approach. Sometimes this technique does work, but all too often the writers misses the full potential of this kernel of a setting that is planted in the opening line. Even worse, the writer creates an inconsistent setting because he haphazardly creates a new world.The lesson here: Think a lot about and fully develop your setting before committing to it.
You Do It
Re-imagine a setting you now frequent. For example, if sitting at a coffee shop, imagine what it will be like a century from now. How will the sights differ? What new sounds will there be? Will the smells be the same? What of taste – will coffee taste different and will other foods exist? What about touch?