MUSINGS ON SCIENCE FICTION
By
Stephen MacEachern

One of the things I notice when my wife and I are editing a book – especially science fiction and fantasy – is the difficulty some writers have with giving the reader a true sense of place. By “sense of place,” of course, I’m referring to setting. Yet, imparting that “sense” also means putting the reader’s mind into that setting, so that the reader sees what the writer sees.

A great many of our over eighty novels have been issued in audio format with varying degrees of dramatization. The most recent audio versions of THE SURVIVALIST series is fully soundscaped with lots of voice actors, incidental music and sound effects – the whole treatment persons my age remember from growing up listening to dramatic radio. Classic dramatic radio, or fully soundscaped modern audio, is what many call “theater of the mind.”

When you listen to really good audio or read a well-written novel or short story, you are watching the most lavishly produced, big-budget spectacle ever made. And, yes, I meant to say “watching.” The human imagination knows no financial constraints. When one reads about a perilous chase scene across a forbidding alien landscape on the backs of gargantuan creatures from another dimension, if the writer did his or her part well, the reader will see that landscape, be a part of that chase, smell the creatures, feel their other-wordly skin.

As editors, we sometimes find that a writer’s otherwise interesting story is taking place on an empty stage. A good way to avoid this is to assume the acting chores for the character through whose eyes this or that portion of the story is being told. Then, merely describe what your character sees and hears and feels and smells. Does the floor creek, the gravel crunch, the wind howl?

Writing fiction can aptly be described as copying down the movie you see in your head as you sit at the keyboard. The idea, then, is to enable your reader to see that same movie the same way you see it.  

Copyright 2008