How to introduce alien flora/fauna without turning the fiction into a biology book?
Got advised on Worldbuilding’s Sandbox to post here, so here I am.
I don’t even know if the word “alien” applies here because to the eyes of the characters, those animals and plants won’t be alien at all.
I’m thinking about creating an unique flora/fauna for the world I designed, but can’t find a way to describe the plants/animals without being boring.
Think: a fantasy writer who uses Earth flora/fauna can just say “wolf” and every reader will know what he’s talking about. Maybe if there are fantastical creatures alongside common animals he can describe them, but them only, and it will not bore the reader.
Now, think about creating everything from scratch. The people of my world know what the animal I need to describe is. After all, the flying scaled green creature who produces a frightening and powerful screech is as common for them as a cow is for us. There is no way to describe it to the reader in the eyes of the character without sounding too expositional.
There are people who can shapeshift into animals in the story. Their entire society values, religion and symbology are deeply connected to animals. It’ll be quite a trick to explain that.
Some considerations:
I do not plan to go berserk. The fictional plants/animals will most likely follow the structure of Earth biology in the sense that they will be divided into trees, grasses, reptiles, mammals, etc.
I won’t write a biology book. Only the animals and plants important to the story will be described.
This is not a story of Earth humans interacting with an alien world. The story is set on the fictional world and narrated in the eyes of that world’s natives.
Movies and games have it way easier since they can simply show and not tell.
With all that in mind, how can I describe the plants and animals unique to the world I created without sounding forcibly expositional? Maybe this won’t work as a book after all?
I won't repeat my answer to this related question here, but instead briefly remind you that writing about an alien world …
8y ago
The sentence where you explain the following is your way into how it should be done: > The story is set on the fictiona …
8y ago
There is another option, and that is to go ahead and describe, describe, describe. A beautifully written natural history …
8y ago
Everything is boring unless it has a function in the story. It it is irrelevant, it is boring. There is nothing you can …
8y ago
It's just scene-setting. Your main character gets up in the morning and goes out onto her balcony to enjoy the morning w …
8y ago
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/26482. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
5 answers
The sentence where you explain the following is your way into how it should be done:
The story is set on the fictional world and narrated in the eyes of that world’s natives.
Now, think about how people tell stories on Earth.
Suppose your friend is going to tell you about a car wreck he just saw right outside before coming into your house. One of the parts of the story is that the driver of one car flew through the windshield.
Now, might your friend tell the story and then say something like:
There was a terrible wreck. Your front lawn is a beautiful shade of green and I love the native lilies you have growing in the front flower bed. The stamens on those lilies are quite interesting. If you look closely you can see each fleck of pollen within the flower bloom. The driver of the Camry went straight through the windshield. She was a bloody mess. The red blood stood in stark contrast to your lovely front lawn. However, it almost matched those red lilies.
No.
Now, if you were writing a non-fiction story about flora and fauna, would you include the following:
I was staring at the beauty of the inner leaves of the lily blossom when a car smacked into a pole in front of our house. A woman flew through the windshield and landed in the flower bed. Her body smashed the flowers flat and I was quite annoyed. I pushed her body to the side and continued my examination of the lilies.
No.
The Point
Focus on the story you are telling.
If some alien in your story ends up crushing the leaves of an exotic plant to make a poison to kill another character, then show me the plant as the character gathers it and crushes the leaves. Otherwise, leave it out.
For it seems, that aliens tell the same stories we on Earth tell: ones that are relevant to the context. :)
When people drone on about things that are not in context, we call them bores.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26486. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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I won't repeat my answer to this related question here, but instead briefly remind you that writing about an alien world is exactly like writing about the real world. You are stuck on the idea that your readers know nothing about this alien world that you made up, but that they are intimately familiar with this world we live in. But that is not true. Do you know how the school system in France works? Do you know what the current fashion in clothes, music, and food is in Turkmenistan? Do you understand the laws and political system in Burkina Faso? I could go on and on like this, but you get the idea: You can read a book written by an author from Chile or Finnland for a Chilean or Finnish audience and get it without knowing all the plants and animals that live there.
Because people are the same everywhere.
Now you are writing about aliens and you might want them to be different from humans, but for the story to have any relevance for your human readers at all, there must be some similarity, some kinship, something that the readers can relate to in the psychology of those aliens, and that will be the essential core of your story, the premise that drives the plot. Everything else is just there like spices to tickle your reader's mind. It is completely unimportant to your story whether that plant is blue or red, so you can
leave all that detail away.
Just tell your story as if your readers where from that alien culture and intimately familiar with it. If the story works for an alien reader, it will work just as well for us.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26496. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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It's just scene-setting. Your main character gets up in the morning and goes out onto her balcony to enjoy the morning while her caffeine is brewing, and she contemplates all the plants in her garden. As her eyes linger over each, describe them briefly, maybe with little stories about why she likes it or when she planted it or how hard it is to cultivate it.
Then she goes to work, and her buddy tells her about the crazy thing his pet TKTK did, and in doing so describes it. ("So Rex got into the kibble, and his head is stuck in the bag. I pull it off and there's kibble all under his scales, and of course the purple kibble looks awful against the green, and then he screeches because the kids startled him and the window shattered!")
When a character shapeshifts, it's perfectly fair to use that as a moment to describe the new animal shape your character has.
Drop in the description when the item comes up, show us through the eyes of one of your characters, and don't overdo it.
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Everything is boring unless it has a function in the story. It it is irrelevant, it is boring. There is nothing you can do with language to make irrelevant stuff not be boring. Conversely, if something is relevant to the story, then it is interesting. Describing it beautifully may be icing on the cake, but it is its function in the story that makes it interesting.
Fantastical creatures and fantastical fauna need a story reason for being fantastical. Their fantasticality is irrelevant unless it plays a role in the story, and therefore boring.
So if your descriptions of your flora and fauna are boring it is not because you are describing them wrong. It is either because they are gratuitously fantastical in a way that is irrelevant to the story or because you are describing them at a time that they are not relevant to the story or in a way that does not make their relevance to the story clear. Connect them to the story and they will not be boring. (Unless the story is boring, of course, but that is another problem.)
Everything that Lauren says in her answer is perfectly valid, but only as long as these things are relevant to the story. What is the story reason that your character gets up and contemplates the strangeness of her garden? What it the story reason for the fantastical beast she transforms into?
If these things are connected to the story then the logic of the story will drive you to reveal them at the appropriate time. If they are not connected to the story than introducing them in the way Lauren suggests will be boring because they are irrelevant and irrelevant = boring.
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There is another option, and that is to go ahead and describe, describe, describe. A beautifully written natural history book or article is a pleasure to read. Here is some inspiration to help you prepare for this approach: the Best of Natural History podcasts, Saving Species and Would You Eat an Alien? from the BBC.
In other words, you need not necessarily hesitate to describe your alien world's natural history on an as needed basis, as the book unfolds.
The people of my world know what the animal I need to describe is.
Your narrator need not write to an imaginary audience of that world. You may imagine that your narrator is bicultural -- comfortable in that world, and comfortable enough in ours, to be able to discern for which plants, animals, concepts and customs will need a little help in following along.
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