Andrew Hall's Blog - Posts Tagged "sci-fi"
Clutter: the power of tiny things in worldbuilding and fiction writing
Writing stories requires us to build worlds. It’s a conjuring spell; a kind of alchemy.
For the spell to work, we have to make this other world feel real. Play tricks on our readers’ minds and immerse them in it, even just for a moment.
But first we need to understand how people actually see the real world around them. How we see it ourselves. Once we can do that, we can replicate this “way of seeing” in the way we write fictional worlds too. This is how we suspend disbelief.
Think about it: we’re myopic creatures. Our brains are short-sighted. While we’re capable of big ideas and long-term thinking, it’s the small thoughts and short-term matters that make up the vast majority of our lives.
We think of the world as a vast endless place. But in reality, it’s six feet across. The few feet around ourself. In reality, life is lived one moment at a time.
Our real world exists at arm’s length. It’s made up of what we can taste and feel, then reach, then smell, then hear, then see. Maybe a sixth sense too, if our tangible world gets too boring. Each sense detects the world a little further, but everything extends and returns to the centre. Our higher brain, then our primal brain, but most of all our gut feelings. We are, first and foremost, an elaborate digestive system in search of food. That’s the primary reason that we sense the world around us. Our world is whatever’s within reach – and whether we can eat or drink it to stay alive.
But how does this relate to storytelling? Well, the real world, the world within reach, also possesses a pervading sense of the mundane. Most of the things around us don’t shock or excite us. We aren’t thrilled by the novelty of a pen we’ve owned for years. We can use this mundane quality to make our fictional worlds feel real as well, and relax our readers into strange places that are still somehow familiar. We can weave in the boring and everyday with the spectacular, to strengthen that spell. A fantastical world, but one we can relate to through its sights, sounds, smells, and objects. We add clutter.
Most of the time, we don’t see the world as a vast landscape. It’s one room, then another, then maybe a wide open space. While we’re entirely capable of big ideas and huge achievements, most of the time we’re living from task to task. Chore to chore, and person to person. And, crucially, from object to object.
We don’t just “cook dinner”. That’s the wider process. In reality, we wash vegetables. We use a knife. We turn the gas on, and boil it up, and stare out the window, and wonder about our life for a while. Maybe see a small dead fly on the sill or something. Then the dust on the frame. Then decide the window’s due for a clean. Grumble at the ads on the radio. Wonder why gas flames are blue. Hope the meal’s going to taste alright when it’s done. Use a pinch of salt, or a spoon.
The point is, we move through a world of fragmented thoughts and objects. Life’s a constant string of microscopic events. A smell, a sound, a thought. One after one after one. It’s only by building up these tiny events over time that we have what we think of as “life” or “the world”. It’s not one monolithic entity, a single slab of stone, but layers and layers of experiential sediment. To make our stories feel more real, we can use words to build up this sensory sediment of its own.
The more you can focus a reader’s attention, the more you’ll suspend their disbelief. To build a convincing world, try to clutter it up with tons of tiny things that the reader, through the character, can interact with. A tool, or a passing bug; maybe an ornament over a fireplace. A cough, a scratch, a sneeze while someone’s talking. The feel of itchy robes. Tons and tons of tiny things.
Building a world isn’t just about vast landscapes. Paint the trees or buildings in the middle ground too. Make them feel real with cracks and weeds, as if we could walk up and touch them, and bring all that huge world into short focus too. The stuff we know, and see, and could touch up-close.
Our minds are hungry, and they came into your story to eat. Lay out the whole fantasy banquet, but also give us the reward of that first bite. Lay out the wider meal, then zoom us in on the main platter. Cut us a slice. Tell us about the slight steam on that glazed roasted meat. The homely smell of it, warm and welcoming while the snow falls outside. Tell us how it’s dripping with a rich gleaming sauce. Give our senses the payoff, for paying attention to your words.
As writers it’s our job to present meaning through story. That’s why people read, because it’s also why people think. But let’s not beat our readers over the head with just the big ideas; the big meanings. Present the huge landscapes in passing, and then give people a closer look. Present the whole banquet of meanings, then give them a small single taste.
Walk with them slowly, right up close to the whole vast painting, and point out just one cherry in a bowl. That’s when we switch on their senses.
That’s when the fiction feels real.
I’ve been trying to achieve this with my own science fiction too. If you need a new read, you can try a free sample right here on Amazon. And please, do let me know if I’ve managed to do this, with the clutter in my stories – or what I should do to improve.
For the spell to work, we have to make this other world feel real. Play tricks on our readers’ minds and immerse them in it, even just for a moment.
But first we need to understand how people actually see the real world around them. How we see it ourselves. Once we can do that, we can replicate this “way of seeing” in the way we write fictional worlds too. This is how we suspend disbelief.
Think about it: we’re myopic creatures. Our brains are short-sighted. While we’re capable of big ideas and long-term thinking, it’s the small thoughts and short-term matters that make up the vast majority of our lives.
We think of the world as a vast endless place. But in reality, it’s six feet across. The few feet around ourself. In reality, life is lived one moment at a time.
Our real world exists at arm’s length. It’s made up of what we can taste and feel, then reach, then smell, then hear, then see. Maybe a sixth sense too, if our tangible world gets too boring. Each sense detects the world a little further, but everything extends and returns to the centre. Our higher brain, then our primal brain, but most of all our gut feelings. We are, first and foremost, an elaborate digestive system in search of food. That’s the primary reason that we sense the world around us. Our world is whatever’s within reach – and whether we can eat or drink it to stay alive.
But how does this relate to storytelling? Well, the real world, the world within reach, also possesses a pervading sense of the mundane. Most of the things around us don’t shock or excite us. We aren’t thrilled by the novelty of a pen we’ve owned for years. We can use this mundane quality to make our fictional worlds feel real as well, and relax our readers into strange places that are still somehow familiar. We can weave in the boring and everyday with the spectacular, to strengthen that spell. A fantastical world, but one we can relate to through its sights, sounds, smells, and objects. We add clutter.
Most of the time, we don’t see the world as a vast landscape. It’s one room, then another, then maybe a wide open space. While we’re entirely capable of big ideas and huge achievements, most of the time we’re living from task to task. Chore to chore, and person to person. And, crucially, from object to object.
We don’t just “cook dinner”. That’s the wider process. In reality, we wash vegetables. We use a knife. We turn the gas on, and boil it up, and stare out the window, and wonder about our life for a while. Maybe see a small dead fly on the sill or something. Then the dust on the frame. Then decide the window’s due for a clean. Grumble at the ads on the radio. Wonder why gas flames are blue. Hope the meal’s going to taste alright when it’s done. Use a pinch of salt, or a spoon.
The point is, we move through a world of fragmented thoughts and objects. Life’s a constant string of microscopic events. A smell, a sound, a thought. One after one after one. It’s only by building up these tiny events over time that we have what we think of as “life” or “the world”. It’s not one monolithic entity, a single slab of stone, but layers and layers of experiential sediment. To make our stories feel more real, we can use words to build up this sensory sediment of its own.
The more you can focus a reader’s attention, the more you’ll suspend their disbelief. To build a convincing world, try to clutter it up with tons of tiny things that the reader, through the character, can interact with. A tool, or a passing bug; maybe an ornament over a fireplace. A cough, a scratch, a sneeze while someone’s talking. The feel of itchy robes. Tons and tons of tiny things.
Building a world isn’t just about vast landscapes. Paint the trees or buildings in the middle ground too. Make them feel real with cracks and weeds, as if we could walk up and touch them, and bring all that huge world into short focus too. The stuff we know, and see, and could touch up-close.
Our minds are hungry, and they came into your story to eat. Lay out the whole fantasy banquet, but also give us the reward of that first bite. Lay out the wider meal, then zoom us in on the main platter. Cut us a slice. Tell us about the slight steam on that glazed roasted meat. The homely smell of it, warm and welcoming while the snow falls outside. Tell us how it’s dripping with a rich gleaming sauce. Give our senses the payoff, for paying attention to your words.
As writers it’s our job to present meaning through story. That’s why people read, because it’s also why people think. But let’s not beat our readers over the head with just the big ideas; the big meanings. Present the huge landscapes in passing, and then give people a closer look. Present the whole banquet of meanings, then give them a small single taste.
Walk with them slowly, right up close to the whole vast painting, and point out just one cherry in a bowl. That’s when we switch on their senses.
That’s when the fiction feels real.
I’ve been trying to achieve this with my own science fiction too. If you need a new read, you can try a free sample right here on Amazon. And please, do let me know if I’ve managed to do this, with the clutter in my stories – or what I should do to improve.
Tabitha
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "What a brilliant book. I spent three quiet days in a cabin by the sea, no tv, just reading this book & it kept me gripped. Great characters & easy reading. Highly recommended, totally different from anything else I have read in this genre."👉 http://amzn.to/3HYgqDa
#scifibooks #kindle #horrorcommunity
ALEX: GORGONOPSIS. Noun. "Monstrous Aspect".
SOUNDTRACK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjcHc...
A sudden fierce stab shocked him conscious. Something tugged on his flesh like pointed pliers; a great ragged crow that pecked a gaping wound. He roared and lashed out painfully, and sent the dark bird lurching skyward; croaking loud Odin caws as it went. His stark gaze followed it, pinprick pupils staring in the daylight, until it vanished between the skyscrapers above. Its freedom, its flight, set him moving.
He felt it all now; the bloody ruins of him. His thoughts came back to him, and anger with it. All of it. Teeth clenched and snarling with it. A more ancient anger that wouldn’t quit, and ran far deeper to his core. A chain reaction. A neutron bomb. Rising now into trembling rage, into hot bloody fury, into seething wrath-volcanic. He snarled and yelled wildly at a world that didn’t want him. What’d driven him before wasn’t there any more; the only thing left was hate. Everything in him, all that’d shaped him, snapped. Alex roared out loud in a throat-breaking bellow and crawled from his puddle of blood. His failed execution. Left for dead. He forced his arms ahead of him. Pressed his palms into the sidewalk. Scratched his filthy nails at the concrete, over and over, to try and grip at it. Dragging himself forward on nothing but a thought.
…I hate you. All of you. I’ll make you suffer, and grow strong from you. I'll devour you. Until there's nothing left.
All his mind was bent on it, a muttering mantra, and he crawled. Wild eyes staring, growling frothed spit through cracked lips and gritted teeth, he dragged himself away from Death. Nothing heroic; more a mad-dog streak. The way mangled wild animals just kept on living. Pure reptile impulse, some engine of evolution, that refused to stop surviving while a single cell still fired. He dragged his silver blood-smear trail behind him. A raging revenant in the ruins.
The fall from that tower block had burst and broken him on the sidewalk. Glancing back, shaking with the pain, he couldn’t feel his legs. Dragging them useless behind him.
He raised himself on raw bloody arms to look around him; these dust-pale ruins of New York. Scouring it all with a piercing wide-eyed glare; starving and unhinged. Knuckle-bones rattling now, soundlessly from somewhere, through strange spiralling thoughts that took him over. Drums thumping louder in his head.
He searched the sidewalks around him, all the glooming buildings and dead dust-wrapped traffic, and saw something in the road that got him drooling. A gored-up jagged jackpot. The corpse of some unearthly monster; a dark hulking mound. Sprouting like shadow from the grey city scene.
…Gorgonopsis, he told himself excitedly. Violence incarnate. He’d never seen one this close before. Staring in wonder at the murdered monstrosity.
He struggled towards it with a mad stare. The drums in his head pounding louder now. Pushing up in agony, he walked on his hands and shuffled his strong bleeding form towards it. Smiling wide as he neared it, eyelids twitching with his shattered nerves, and those feral drums were deafening thunder in his soul.
His chuckling half-corpse dragged itself on through the ashen aftermath, towards that titan of monstrous carrion in the road. Muscles straining against the cold massive shape of it, he wrenched and peeled its rubber-metal armour where the tank shots had cratered it apart. The battletank itself was a mauled-open mess in the distance; coated with dust and deformed in melted shapes. Alex pulled open a flesh-creaking crevice in the monster, wide enough to bury his face inside it, and bear-hugged its carcass to sink his teeth through the muscles. The white meat scrunched and squeaked as he bit at solid cords of it; fraying fibrous with a smell like latex steak. It peeled in bloody pops and sheared away as he chewed it; he crushed and mashed a mouthful with cracked and bleeding teeth.
He swallowed a bloody chunk, gasping orgasmic at the taste of it, and suddenly all that mattered was sprawled out bleeding before him. There for the taking, and by god would he take it. He filled his lungs with the smell of it. Frantic breaths in a carnivore snarl. Pupils swelling into drugged dilation. He held it still and buried his teeth in the flesh of it. The soundless devourings of a creature on a kill. Ripping great flopping shreds of it, he gripped and twisted and swallowed them whole. Savage silence, and lethal lunges; crocodile crunches in the dust. Squelching snaps and gluttonous gulps as he gripped corded flesh and crammed it between his teeth.
The city around him was blurred-out powders. The carcass before him, all that truly mattered now. Glowing nocturnal in bizarre hyperfocus, as if it writhed and reached and called to him for more. Alex buried his bloody face to the centre of it, peeling apart its furnace-guts and dragging away a great glob of metal set inside it. He tore in deeper, and gnawed off a chunk of its dark giant heart. Devouring it. Gasping wild and gulping as he filled his stomach to bursting with it. Its sticky cells came alive in him. A painkiller tide that helped him stand on his hands, and forced his appetite to swallow more of it. Eating for his life. It shot him through with strange sudden strength. A fresh energy; alien adrenaline to the heart. Spurring him on to suck at the monster’s blood, in those gleaming silver crevices where it pooled and trickled to the asphalt.
His meal put a drunken daze on him; melting his inhibitions. Snapping the restraints of that old fallen world that’d stamped down the psycho ape inside him. He pounced reptilian and locked his teeth into it. Jolting his body to rip at it. Filling his throat with it, that rich delicious flesh and starlight-flavoured blood, until he had to find some other way to take in more of it. Gulping vampiric on cold silver pints of it, until nothing more of that gorgon would fit inside him.
Its dormant tissues came alive in him. Both animals evolving. Cells growing less separate. Intertwining. Adapting to survive.
Alex was about to become much, much more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjcHc...
A sudden fierce stab shocked him conscious. Something tugged on his flesh like pointed pliers; a great ragged crow that pecked a gaping wound. He roared and lashed out painfully, and sent the dark bird lurching skyward; croaking loud Odin caws as it went. His stark gaze followed it, pinprick pupils staring in the daylight, until it vanished between the skyscrapers above. Its freedom, its flight, set him moving.
He felt it all now; the bloody ruins of him. His thoughts came back to him, and anger with it. All of it. Teeth clenched and snarling with it. A more ancient anger that wouldn’t quit, and ran far deeper to his core. A chain reaction. A neutron bomb. Rising now into trembling rage, into hot bloody fury, into seething wrath-volcanic. He snarled and yelled wildly at a world that didn’t want him. What’d driven him before wasn’t there any more; the only thing left was hate. Everything in him, all that’d shaped him, snapped. Alex roared out loud in a throat-breaking bellow and crawled from his puddle of blood. His failed execution. Left for dead. He forced his arms ahead of him. Pressed his palms into the sidewalk. Scratched his filthy nails at the concrete, over and over, to try and grip at it. Dragging himself forward on nothing but a thought.
…I hate you. All of you. I’ll make you suffer, and grow strong from you. I'll devour you. Until there's nothing left.
All his mind was bent on it, a muttering mantra, and he crawled. Wild eyes staring, growling frothed spit through cracked lips and gritted teeth, he dragged himself away from Death. Nothing heroic; more a mad-dog streak. The way mangled wild animals just kept on living. Pure reptile impulse, some engine of evolution, that refused to stop surviving while a single cell still fired. He dragged his silver blood-smear trail behind him. A raging revenant in the ruins.
The fall from that tower block had burst and broken him on the sidewalk. Glancing back, shaking with the pain, he couldn’t feel his legs. Dragging them useless behind him.
He raised himself on raw bloody arms to look around him; these dust-pale ruins of New York. Scouring it all with a piercing wide-eyed glare; starving and unhinged. Knuckle-bones rattling now, soundlessly from somewhere, through strange spiralling thoughts that took him over. Drums thumping louder in his head.
He searched the sidewalks around him, all the glooming buildings and dead dust-wrapped traffic, and saw something in the road that got him drooling. A gored-up jagged jackpot. The corpse of some unearthly monster; a dark hulking mound. Sprouting like shadow from the grey city scene.
…Gorgonopsis, he told himself excitedly. Violence incarnate. He’d never seen one this close before. Staring in wonder at the murdered monstrosity.
He struggled towards it with a mad stare. The drums in his head pounding louder now. Pushing up in agony, he walked on his hands and shuffled his strong bleeding form towards it. Smiling wide as he neared it, eyelids twitching with his shattered nerves, and those feral drums were deafening thunder in his soul.
His chuckling half-corpse dragged itself on through the ashen aftermath, towards that titan of monstrous carrion in the road. Muscles straining against the cold massive shape of it, he wrenched and peeled its rubber-metal armour where the tank shots had cratered it apart. The battletank itself was a mauled-open mess in the distance; coated with dust and deformed in melted shapes. Alex pulled open a flesh-creaking crevice in the monster, wide enough to bury his face inside it, and bear-hugged its carcass to sink his teeth through the muscles. The white meat scrunched and squeaked as he bit at solid cords of it; fraying fibrous with a smell like latex steak. It peeled in bloody pops and sheared away as he chewed it; he crushed and mashed a mouthful with cracked and bleeding teeth.
He swallowed a bloody chunk, gasping orgasmic at the taste of it, and suddenly all that mattered was sprawled out bleeding before him. There for the taking, and by god would he take it. He filled his lungs with the smell of it. Frantic breaths in a carnivore snarl. Pupils swelling into drugged dilation. He held it still and buried his teeth in the flesh of it. The soundless devourings of a creature on a kill. Ripping great flopping shreds of it, he gripped and twisted and swallowed them whole. Savage silence, and lethal lunges; crocodile crunches in the dust. Squelching snaps and gluttonous gulps as he gripped corded flesh and crammed it between his teeth.
The city around him was blurred-out powders. The carcass before him, all that truly mattered now. Glowing nocturnal in bizarre hyperfocus, as if it writhed and reached and called to him for more. Alex buried his bloody face to the centre of it, peeling apart its furnace-guts and dragging away a great glob of metal set inside it. He tore in deeper, and gnawed off a chunk of its dark giant heart. Devouring it. Gasping wild and gulping as he filled his stomach to bursting with it. Its sticky cells came alive in him. A painkiller tide that helped him stand on his hands, and forced his appetite to swallow more of it. Eating for his life. It shot him through with strange sudden strength. A fresh energy; alien adrenaline to the heart. Spurring him on to suck at the monster’s blood, in those gleaming silver crevices where it pooled and trickled to the asphalt.
His meal put a drunken daze on him; melting his inhibitions. Snapping the restraints of that old fallen world that’d stamped down the psycho ape inside him. He pounced reptilian and locked his teeth into it. Jolting his body to rip at it. Filling his throat with it, that rich delicious flesh and starlight-flavoured blood, until he had to find some other way to take in more of it. Gulping vampiric on cold silver pints of it, until nothing more of that gorgon would fit inside him.
Its dormant tissues came alive in him. Both animals evolving. Cells growing less separate. Intertwining. Adapting to survive.
Alex was about to become much, much more.
