Colours of ultraviolet
I need to write something from the perspective of a character who sees colours differently from humans, and in particular can see multiple shades of ultraviolet. This isn't unique, their entire species sees like this. Can anyone suggest language or writing techniques to make that work?
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You can make up a completely alien analogy to viewing colors. Like describing the colors by their frequency using musical notation.
There are studies in chromophonics that correlate sounds with colors.
One such scholar is professor and orchestral conductor Jorge Antunes. (disclosure: I studied under him).
Here is Another work that correlates music and sounds.
This is only an example of replacing one kind of notation by another.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38487. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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One of the strongest advantages of the medium of the written word (as opposed to, say, movies) is that you can describe something that is impossible to experience, and readers will still accept it.
Terry Pratchett's novel The Color of Magic has several great examples of describing a color beyond what we'd be able to see. Notice how all of his descriptions focus on the subjective experience of seeing the color and its importance within the setting, even though you couldn't picture what octarine looks like in your mind's eye:
It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.
But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.
[W]izards, even failed wizards, have in addition to rods and cones in their eyeballs the tiny octagons that enable them to see into the far octarine, the basic colour of which all other colours are merely pale shadows impinging on normal four-dimensional space. It is said to be a sort of fluorescent greenish-yellow purple.
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