Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/10866
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You may be interested in Brandon Sanderson's lecture series on writing long form fantasy and science fiction:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/WriteAboutDragons/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/WriteAboutDragons/videos)

This is an excellent series on the practical craft of writing and particularly about what you asked about, writing about what is alien to the reader.

He talks at one point about the dangers of "Infodump", ie dumping a lot of information on the reader about your "alien" world, particularly at the beginning of the book. His main advice was to ground the reader in the scene by using concrete language and description, while layering abstract information on top. A description of a concrete object can say a lot about the world and the characters. One of his examples was to describe the wall of a city. One character might notice that it was an excellent wall to fend off a siege. This tells us that siege warfare is a reality in this world, and also that the character has a military background, while still keeping us grounded in an image of the physical scene. Every concrete description can have a multiple purpose that tells us something about the alien world. In a very alien world the trick is in keeping an appropriate balance. If you can show everything through the eyes of your characters you will avoid going off into abstract descriptions of things.

It's also worth considering that it may not be necessary for all of the details of your world to actually make it in to the book. Their presence can be felt without an explicit description. That feeling of realness comes from all the things you don't see as much as those you do. Just think about Tolkein's Silmarillion. He had a whole mythical history for Middle Earth that was never published in his lifetime, but the weight of that detail can be felt in his published fiction.

Original score: 5