Familiarity and accessibility...

[khiemtran]

One of the things I am working on to make my writing more accessible is to introduce a sense of familiarity into the story. It turns out that writing weird or alien is not all that hard to do. Making it accessible is.

What I am aiming for at the moment is a mix between the familar and the new, instead of everything being all new. The idea is to ease the workload on the reader and give them more time to soak in the parts that are genuinely alien to them. It's roughly equivalent to the difference between a police procedural set in the alien culture of the planet of X'far, and a plot based around the complex alien ritual of Shr-krek-nu on the same planet.

First off the rank is the clay boy story, and the way I'm attempting to establish familiarity is to stick to a fairly tight plot pattern. I'm hoping for an episodic structure, where the reader knows roughly what to expect to happen, the only question is how. I'm also making it more explicitly set in ancient China, rather than a different world, to draw on the full set of resonances available.

Comments

[zanzjan.livejournal.com]

One of the things I am working on to make my writing more accessible is to introduce a sense of familiarity into the story. It turns out that writing weird or alien is not all that hard to do. Making it accessible is.

Eh, I'm not sure I totally agree with that, on a general level. Some writers have trouble making aliens alien enough, e.g. the "Star Trek" aliens which are just people with funny noses or foreheads. It's finding the right balance between the too-familiar and the too-different that's the tricky part, though I'd think it'd be at least a little easier coming towards accessible than away.