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N. K. JEMISIN: Create a story that engages your reader as

if they are part of that world or we

create a story that reminds the reader that they are just

observing the world through a window.

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Let's visualize immersion as a pyramid.

Let's think about the fact that when

you're creating a secondary world, when you're creating

a world that your reader has got to learn to get into,

you have to decide how you want to convey

this amount of information to them.

You can just give them a giant info dump at the very beginning

of the book that was very traditional in science

fiction for many years.

If you read a lot of older science fiction,

you'll see that it starts with a prologue where they just

drop a whole bunch of information on you.

That's a form of immersion, but it's not--

you know, it's not really in style anymore.

But you've got some choices.

You can create a story that engages your reader as if they

are part of the world or you can create

a story that reminds the reader that they are just a reader

observing the world through a window.

And I think of the latter as lower immersion and the former,

where you're immersed in that world

as if you're a part of it, as high immersion.

And then there's also a kind of in-between

of moderate immersion.

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Low immersion stories can be third person omniscient,

which was very popular, again, for a while.

Third person omniscient is he walked to the store

and he was thinking about a bunch of different things

as he did so.

You know the character's thoughts and actions.

The narrator is telling you everything that's

going on with this person.

And they're telling it to you as if they are telling a story.

And it reminds you that you are the reader sitting

at one removed from the book.

A good example of low immersion third person omniscient

is The Gormenghast novels by Mervyn Peake,

very elaborate sort of almost Gothic fantasy set

in an ancient old castle among a group of people

that have enacted various rituals for centuries.

And the story follows a young man who is born into this world

and has to kind of learn how to figure it out.

But it's told by the narrator.

You hear the narrator explaining a lot of what this character is

going through.

With the moderate immersion stories, in a lot of cases,

that's going to be third person but more limited.

You're not going to know what's going on in the character's

head unless you're specifically in that character's narration.

And while that character is talking to other characters

around them, you won't know what's

going on in those other characters' heads

because the person who's the viewpoint character

doesn't know what's in their head.

You can know what they see.

That character can interpret what

other people's facial expressions might mean,

but they might be wrong.

And so you are, at that point, kind of limited to only

what that one viewpoint character at a time

is able to tell you.

A typical example of a third person limited

or moderate immersion would be the second book of My Dream

Blood series, The Shadowed Sun.

The bulk of the story is told through the perspective

of a young woman named Hanani, who

is encountering a lot of really new experiences

throughout the story.

It's very limited.

We see only her chapters from her point of view.

And she's interpreting other characters' actions

through her viewpoint.

You do occasionally get chapters from other characters'

point of view.

And you can compare how she's interpreting

that character versus how the character thinks

about themselves.

I mean, that tells you a little bit about both characters

in that case, but that's a good example of moderate immersion.

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In a high immersion story, you're

going through that story, you're going

through that character's life, as if you are that character.

That's often in first person.

Sometimes you see it in extremely tight third person.

Second person is a way to get deep into the character's mind,

intentions, motivations and so forth.

It's not omniscient.

You're not being told what's going on.

You're literally experiencing it as the character is doing so.

You're feeling what the character feels.

You're tasting what they taste.

In some cases, the character is going to,

if they're going through a new experience, for example,

the character's going to pause and kind of explain

what's going on to themselves.

And then the reader is able to learn it as well.

But in a lot of cases, it's all just there from context.

The character picks up an object,

interacts with that object.

The object might be something that you've never seen or heard

from before.

But because the character knows what it is,

then you're able to learn what it is as well.

So the Hunger Games trilogy, for example,

which is pretty tightly in Katniss's perspective

in a lot of cases, where she's explaining her world to you

because her world doesn't make a lot of sense to her.

So she's constantly kind of trying to make sense of it.

And so her attempts to sort of try and understand

why she's got to go through all these things

as she's going through them as you're experiencing them

with her, feeling what she feels,

smelling what she smells, these are the ways

that you're learning about her world.

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The easiest ways to lose a reader when

you are trying to immerse them is really

kind of giving them a story that is

incompatible with the kind of immersion that you've chosen.

If you've created a story that exists

in a complete secondary world, nothing vaguely

resembling earth, no familiarity at all.

And you've chosen to do, oh say, a third person very tight

limited where your character, who is a part of this world

and doesn't need to explain it to themselves,

is just going about his or her or their day

and has no reason to pause and tell the reader

or help the reader contextually understand what's going on,

then you're going to lose that reader.

Because they're going to struggle to understand what

this world is.

If you've created a world with--

or if you've decided to write a story with high immersion

storytelling method, but it's a world that's

incredibly familiar to people, where you don't have to explain

everything that's going on, you're

going to lose some people there too.

An example is with my novel The City We Became,

which is set in modern day New York.

There's some otherworldly stuff happening in it,

but it's set in a place that a lot of people

are extremely familiar with.

But because there are a lot of people

who aren't familiar with New York,

I did actually have to describe New York as I

was going through the story.

I did actually have to explain the subway, which to any New

Yorker is just like a thing.

But what it meant was that I chose a viewpoint character who

I didn't stick with throughout the story,

but he was kind of one of my main viewpoint characters,

who was new to New York.

And I had a reason to explain things like how to hail a cab.

He needed a reason to kind of contemplate

all of these little simplicities of New York.

And I still feel like I suspect I lost some readers.

I probably did lose some readers with that

because people who were extremely familiar with New

York were impatient with all of the explaining that

had to be done for this one character who was not

familiar with the city.

But I was doing that explaining for all

of the readers who weren't who weren't familiar with the city

either.

I hate the show don't tell.

The idea of show don't tell is great for beginning writers.

All of these rules that you hear about that

are the rules of good writing are

excellent for beginning writers because beginning writers

need to know where their parameters are.

They need to know how far they can go.

And they tend to overdo it until they get a better sense of what

is realistic or what is normal or what

is their own style, what works for them.

And then once they've got that, then they

can kind of start to discard some of those basic rules.

And when you are doing world-building,

when you are talking about a setting that isn't earth,

sometimes you do just have to explain things.

Sometimes you do just have to tell.

And it's unavoidable if you're trying

to help your reader get through that major learning curve.

You can communicate quite a bit by context,

but sometimes you just got to come out

and say what you mean to say.