Rx for the Imagination: Scavenging Real-World Details for Your Fantasy and Science Fiction Worlds
From time to time, when people hear that I write fantasy and science fiction, they tell me I must have a great imagination.
I smile, all the while thinking, “If they only knew!”
The truth is, my imagination needs a lot of help.
Some writers of speculative fiction may conjure entire worlds out of pure imagination. Not me! There’s no way I could bring my fantasy and science fiction worlds to life without filching whole great chunks from this world. I’m going to offer a few examples of productive pilfering in my own work, and suggest how a little larceny might benefit yours, as well.
Critters
Some of my favorite fantasy-critter details have come from random bits of my day-to-day life.
As I was writing Dragon’s Milk, my kitten, Nimbus, sat in my lap, kneading my legs with her paws and purring. Not coincidentally, the baby dragons in the book knead my protagonist’s legs with their talons and thrum in their throats.
A few details came to me from memories. When I was a kid, we had a dog who had a litter of seven puppies. Bouncy and adorable! At some point, they shed their baby coats; there was a coarser, more rugged coat underneath.
This came together with another, earlier, memory of when my mother and I captured butterflies and mounted them in frames. I’m pretty much appalled at that, thinking back. But I vividly remember what a butterfly’s wing feels like. So, baby dragons, when newborns, have a kind of yellow-tan coat that feels “powdery, like butterfly wings.”
And after the draclings shed their baby coats? Well, she’s not technically a “critter,” but my daughter, Kelly, was a baby while I began writing Dragon’s Milk. So it’s no surprise that the baby dragons’ scales, when first revealed, are “thin and translucent as a baby’s fingernails.”
Geography, Large to Small
Large:
My new YA science fiction novel, Sea Change, takes place on a barrier island off the coast of Texas, kind of like Galveston. Actually, it’s a lot like Galveston, a place with its own distinctive vibe. I’ve layered on a bunch of technology and imagined some draconian consequences of the inevitable future sea level rise. But the quirky details—the sea creature-themed kites, the pastel-colored houses on stilts, the smell of coconut-fried shrimp, the riprap, the tourists pedaling bright-canopied surreys through the streets…I stole them from you-know-where!
Medium:
In each of the first three books of my Dragon Chronicles series, there is a smaller pocket of geography: a cave. Each cave is completely different from the others, and I’ve visited all three kinds.
The first, in Dragon’s Milk, is based on a lava tube in eastern Oregon. It starts off really tall, but gets more and more cramped and narrow as you walk through, until, at the end, you have to get down on your knees and crawl.
The second, in Flight of the Dragon Kyn, is a complex of caves with stalactites and stalagmites, based on the Oregon Caves in southern Oregon. These caves are huge. You wander from room to room among a host of dripping stalactites and stalagmites.
The third, in Sign of the Dove, is a sea cave, based on the Sea Lion Caves on the Oregon coast. These caves are open to the Pacific Ocean; their dimensions change with the rise and fall of the tides. Yep, the sea lions are in there, along with hosts of calling seabirds.
Small:
The smallest bit of geography yet comes from Sea Change: I’m talking about the Mermaid, the cruise ship that serves as a group home for about a hundred fifteen-year-olds who can breathe underwater. It’s true that I advanced the technology a bit, and then fitted out the ship for sustainable living—with raised garden beds, a small herd of goats, reverse osmosis tanks, a retractable solar array, and a sleeping pool. But the basic layout and structure come directly from high-end luxury cruise company brochures.
History
Kragrom, in Flight of the Dragon Kyn, is based on medieval Scandinavia. My protagonist’s life begins on a steading with a cluster of grass-roofed buildings, including a hearthroom house and a kitchenhouse. When the king’s men take her away in a knar, the women of the steading pack up “lengths of wadmal, sealskins, and reindeer pelts, and combs of walrus tusk.” I borrowed these details, and others, from a specific historical time and place.
Tips for Productive Pilfering
You want your imagined worlds to be vivid and filled with unexpected details. So, see if you can find ways to put dissimilar things together. A kitten’s purr, a butterfly’s wing, a baby’s fingernails… When associated with something formidable, like dragons, they can be surprising.
Another example, from Sea Change: Pairing the height of opulence—a high-end, luxury cruise ship—with a subsistence farm garden.
Avoid the generic. Before I visited the three different caves, my idea of “cave” was pretty much standard-issue. But, especially since my characters persist in visiting caves throughout the Dragon Chronicles, the specificity and distinctiveness of the three different types of caves makes them feel more solid and my fictional worlds more real.
If you model your world at least partly on a specific real-world place, consider choosing one that’s distinctive in some way. Consider the quirkiness of Galveston. And the unusual words and objects in Medieval Scandinavia: wadmal, hearthroom house, a knar. However, a caveat: Consider, too, the perils of excessive or unsuitable appropriation—sweeping up too many details from a background you don’t know well enough, especially if it’s not your own.
Finally, remember to use as many senses as you can when collecting your details. Don’t neglect smell (the smell of coconut-fried shrimp) or touch (the powdery feel of a butterfly’s wing) or sound (the drip of stalactites and stalagmites).
Last word
I pilfer—steal--so liberally from the real world partly because my imagination is not up to the task of creating a whole world all by itself and partly because I believe that connecting the fantasy world to this one helps to make it feel real.
Flannery O’Connor wrote: “...when one writes a fantasy, reality is the proper basis of it...I would even go so far as to say that the person writing a fantasy has to be even more strictly attentive to the concrete detail than someone writing in a naturalistic vein—because the more convincing the properties in it have to be.”
Hear, hear!
Susan Fletcher is the author of fourteen books for young readers, including Sea Change, a young adult science fiction love story set in a time of accelerated climate change and human gene hacking. Her books have been translated into ten languages and have received awards and recognition from the American Library Association, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Western Writers of America, Women Writing in the West, and many other organizations. She taught for many years in the M.F.A. in Writing for Children program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Find her at www.susanfletcher.com.
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