"Now I see it..."

[khiemtran]

Still on the same rasfc thread...

I think there's an important "now I see it" moment when you're trying to describe new and alien to a reader. In general, I dislike the term "grok" because it's so easy to misgrok something, but I think the concept is useful here. It's not so much that the reader really does understand at that particular point, it's that they *think* they understand, and that means the information then gets processed differently.

You could, for example, be describing an alien species, and give all sorts of details about its number of limbs and joints and coverings, and the reader will soak up many of these things, but it will still remain as a loose connection of facts until you hit that "now I see it" moment and the reader (or at least *this* reader) can file it away and start working on the next thing. An alternative example would be one of those one-line movie pitches. 'It's "Die Hard on a Boat" on a Train'. If you tell me the alien looks like a metre tall cat with wings, I can file it away instantly and draw it later - even if that's not *exactly* what the alien looks like. In fact, it could even be completely inaccurate. Once it's "known" information, I've gone from worrying about what the alien looks like to having something concrete that I can build on later. It's one less ball that I have to keep my eye on as I'm juggling new facts and information.

That said, in the prequel to the story by Zeborah which started this thread, I actually liked the way the aliens were only ever described in hints and asides and the way it was largely left up to the reader to picture what they really looked like. (Although I did have a lot of trouble at the start in remembering which aliens were which, until I hit the "now I see it" moment for each of them, and for the set of them.)

Comments

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

An alien can be described in extreme detail but unless there's a drawing to go with that, I won't visualize anything. I'll think "not human" when the alien is in a scene, but that's it. Except in the most basic terms, I don't visualize when I read. I sense the concepts of a story, but I "see" it in words, not pictures. Which is of interest to me, because I'm very visual in that my interests lean toward art, photography, comic books, TV, movies, and other visual media. Books are a realm unto themselves and I simply process the words as words.

And for that reason, I don't expect readers to get the same "picture" in mind that I might intend. It's the concept of different that matters to me.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Ah, but is there still a point where you go feel like you suddenly understand a concept?

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm.... I think mostly, because I'm freed of having actual images to deal with, I get the concepts sooner rather than later. It's only if the author obscured a detail or left a lot out and I couldn't figure it out, that I'll have that ah-ha moment when everything comes clear, usually with a revelation in the story.

I think Arthur Clarke did that to me in Imperial Earth, if I'm recalling it correctly, with the protagonist being a black character and since there was no info early on re: his ethnicity, I filled that in as white, which I am. It wasn't a big deal, story-wise, but it did point out a personal, and understandable, bias I and probably most readers have.

More often, I struggle with a scientific aspect or something in an alien culture, rather than the nature of an alien character, which has as much to do with my level of familiarity of a concept in general as with an author's ability to write it. If that makes any sense. And it's why I worry about writing scientific concepts because I'm convinced everyone understands them better than I do, even if I'm no dunce, either. :)