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A sense of wonder

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
This is key in fantasy writing, but when I look at my own WIP I realize I need to be more explicit as to what this means. So I wrote this in my notebook. There's a part two, which addresses "adventure."

What is a "sense of wonder" and how do I create that using only words?

To start with, wonder comes from wondering: what's that? Who's that? How did that happen? It is tempting to say the goal is to amaze the reader, and that's part of it, but not the whole of it. Readers are, on the whole, fickle and ungrateful creatures, whose reactions can never be predicted. I don't control them, but I do control my characters.

A wonder therefore must cause a reaction in one or more characters who witness it. The wonder may be new to the reader, but it absolutely must be new (or surprising) to the character. The character reacts, so the reader can react. Merely describing a thing, no matter how spectacular the prose, is not likely to create a sense of wonder.

I don't believe a sense of wonder involves just any emotion. Wonder is, at its heart, a positive emotion. Wonder belongs to surprise, amazement, even trepidation, but it does not belong to grief or regret (to grab a few emotions somewhat at random). For example, Tolkien gives us Lothlorien not from above but from inside. Legoas is happy to be there, Gimli is fearful, Aragorn is pragmatically cautious, and the hobbits are mostly overwhelmed. Those reactions create our sense of wonder. Mallorn trees alone won't do the trick.

How do I apply this in my own writing?

First (instructions to self), create your wonders. Size is a favorite--big or small, but make it exceptional. Grotesques are reliable--the old half-man, half-horse gambit. Take whatever you like, but give it a twist. Surprise is another, and here behavior provides a good opportunity. Make the giant kindly, the wee fairy treacherous. Whatever I choose, it must provoke a reaction in specific characters. It's the character who must be surprised, amazed, overwhelmed.

Anticipation can help, especially for major wonders. Tolkien doesn't bring Smaug or the Balrog on stage in a single scene. He sets it up, giving the characters (and thus the reader) plenty to think about and react to. And then, and this is crucial, he delivers. The wondrous beast needs to justify the hype, and the prose must be up to the task. As a corollary, the big wonder gets more than one scene. This lets multiple characters get multiple views, and so multiple reactions.

Related to this, don't try to describe everything. If you (me) find you are describing an elf by moving from head to toe, or a city by doing a flyover of every district, then don't. Think how Tolkien introduces Minas Tirith, for example. Doing a detailed description isn't exactly wrong, but it tends to be impersonal, and we're aiming for the personal. Pick out two or three highlights, ones a specific character would notice.

The main thing about the specifics of the wondrous is to go for a single emotion. The reader may have ambiguity about the wondrous thing (augh, not another vampire!), but should be clear about how the character reacts. This will create the emotional space for the reader's reaction.

Lesser wonders call for less prose. I have to be careful not to wear the reader out, lest this become just one thing after another. One way to keep watch on this is to stay squarely inside the character's head. Every wonder should produce a reaction. When I start rolling my eyes when the character goes "gee golly wow" yet again, I'll know I've gone a bridge too far. Maybe no more than one wonder per chapter? I dunno; might serve as a rough guide.

How about you folks? Have you thought about the mechanics and requisites for creating a sense of wonder?
 
This reminds me of something I brought up in an older thread:

That reminds me of this, from Witchcraft by Charles Williams:

"One is aware that a phenomenon, being wholly itself, is laden with universal meaning. A hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from a train is the rock of all existence....Two light dancing steps by a girl may...appear to be what all the Schoolmen were trying to express...but two quiet steps by an old man may seem like the very speech of hell. Or the other way around."​

The poet Auden, in his essay Making, Knowing, and Judging, quoted that from Charles Williams and then added this:

The response of the imagination to such a presence or significance is a passion of awe. This awe may vary greatly in intensity and range in tone from joyous wonder to panic dread. A sacred being may be attractive or repulsive—a swan or an octopus—beautiful or ugly—a toothless hag or a fair young child—good or evil—a Beatrice or a Belle Dame Sans Merci—historical fact or fiction—a person met on the road or an image encountered in a story or a dream—it may be noble or something unmentionable in a drawing room, it may be anything it likes on condition, but this condition is absolute, that it arouse awe.​
Judging from my own experience as a reader, I don't think the rule of having some character react with a sense of wonder is absolute. I'm trying to remember an example of what I mean. Occasionally, a scene will be written from a character's POV, and the character will be using some magic that is awesome (to me) but the character is entirely familiar with that magic so it's not awesome to him. He's alone, and there's no one else around to witness that use of magic. Sometimes a character is traversing a setting that is awesome but familiar to him, like a city, and all the inhabitants of that city are going about their usual business not even realizing how odd, wondrous, etc., various elements of that city are. I can feel awe even if the characters aren't.

That said, I've always used the example of the LOTR movies. I'm sure I've brought this up before. Those two giant statues the Fellowship float under? Members of the Fellowship are shown to be in awe. That huge chamber with all the columns in Moria? Ditto. The Balrog? Ditto. And on and on and on. I've always thought that was excellent. Jackson knew what he was doing. I also think that my own sense of wonder, awe, dread was greatly heightened when a character or characters react the same way. My earlier examples of wonder that the character doesn't experience do produce wonder (or other related feelings), but it's a more muted, generalized sense of wonder, usually.

Here's the sad thing. I haven't consciously thought about trying to produce this in my own writing, at least not well. In a current project, I already know of various instances and things that I've yet to write that will produce this sense, I hope. Moments of heightened tension that should produce these feelings of wonder and dread for the characters as well. But I hadn't actually given much thought to what I'll need to do to make that effect the best it can be.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
How about you folks? Have you thought about the mechanics and requisites for creating a sense of wonder?
Yes, but not in a structured way. I's all very vague and fluffy. Something about contrast and believeability.
I'll try and sort out something comprehensible and get back to this.
 

Heliotrope

Staff
Article Team
I can't help feeling that this somehow relates to our "description" thread from earlier.

What is a "sense of wonder"

Today I watched a David Copperfield vid on youtube with my 7 year old. When old Copperfield did his trick my boy's eyes widened, his mouth opened, and the only thing he had to say was "How, mommy? How?"

That, for me, is wonder. It is that sense of "how?" The question.

how do I create that using only words?

This is tricky. I have no idea? lol. I try to do it by doing the same as above, raising questions. I try to present the material to the reader as a question, so they think, "But how did that get there? How did that happen?" It's like Stonehenge. Part of the reason it instills wonder is because people still "wonder" about it. How did it get there? How did they build it? Why? What purpose did it serve?

There was a show in Disneyland a while back called Mickey and the Magical Map. In the story, Mickey wants to join the ranks of "map makers" on a magical map. The quest, fill in a blank spot on the map. Mickey travels around and around, and finds, no matter where he goes, he can't fill the blank spot. it keeps moving on him, shifting and changing and darting away. The lesson Mickey HAS to learn is that once the map is "finished" there is no wonder left. There is no mystery. There are no more questions. Everything is known and so magic and wonder dies. As a great map maker, he has to learn to leave a bit unfinished. To leave a bit up to the imagination. And so he leaves the spot and gets to join the ranks of "map makers."

I think, what made the statues great in LOTR is that they aren't explained. They don't need to be. They hint at a great history, but don't tell about it. That way it leaves it up to the viewer what used to go on there. It creates questions. It creates a sense of wonder.

In regards to monsters, creatures etc, I have heard the advice "Don't show it until the end, or even better, don't show it at all." Let the reader's imagination do the work. Show what the beast is capable of. Show the damage it does. Show the fear it instills, but don't show it. Leave it to the reader. I think in most cases this is true. Think of most horror movies... the suspense at the beginning when you wonder, "What was that?" The suspense is ruined slightly, once the creatures is shown (especially with terrible CGI, lol).
 

Heliotrope

Staff
Article Team
A wonder therefore must cause a reaction in one or more characters who witness it. The wonder may be new to the reader, but it absolutely must be new (or surprising) to the character. The character reacts, so the reader can react. Merely describing a thing, no matter how spectacular the prose, is not likely to create a sense of wonder.

Yes, I agree with this. I have read a few manuscripts for new writers where they present material, but I'm not sure how I'm supposed to respond to it. I wonder, is this normal in this world? Or this is odd? When a character reacts, then I can gauge my own assessment of the situation.
 

Yora

Maester
I think, what made the statues great in LOTR is that they aren't explained. They don't need to be. They hint at a great history, but don't tell about it. That way it leaves it up to the viewer what used to go on there. It creates questions. It creates a sense of wonder.

In regards to monsters, creatures etc, I have heard the advice "Don't show it until the end, or even better, don't show it at all." Let the reader's imagination do the work. Show what the beast is capable of. Show the damage it does. Show the fear it instills, but don't show it. Leave it to the reader. I think in most cases this is true. Think of most horror movies... the suspense at the beginning when you wonder, "What was that?" The suspense is ruined slightly, once the creatures is shown (especially with terrible CGI, lol).
I think it works basically the same way as with horror. The most interesting part of the monster is in the shadow. You absolutely have to leave a big part of it in the shadow because this is the part where the audience puts its own, individual expectations. No matter what you might come up with what lies in the shadow, it can never be as good as the expectation. This is because the audience does not fill the shadow with reasonable and logical assumptions based on the bits that are shown, but instead it fills it with emotions. These emotions create the sense of dread, and I think it's the same way with a sense of wonder.

What you want to do is provide enough factual information to hint at something much bigger, but then never reveal the whole thing. Tell only what is needed, but leave the rest unsaid. The emotional expectations of what the unseen parts could be are what makes something magical.
Just don't make the same mistake that Abrams always does with his silly Mystery Box approach. Don't structure your story as an investigation of a mystery and then not bothering with having any actual answer for it yourself. The question that the plot revolves around needs to have a resolution. But it's everything else beyond that can be left ambigious or completely open.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
What is a "sense of wonder" and how do I create that using only words?
Part of me wants to argue that it's not the words, but the content hidden within them that's the source of the wonder. In a way it's perhaps a bit facetious and nitpicky, but let's run with it for now.

I'll try and sort out something comprehensible and get back to this.
This may be a bit messy, but...

I think that to create a sense of wonder you'll first have to establish some kind of norm, and then introduce something that rises above that norm and pushes the boundaries in a significant way. You may have to be careful not to push it too far and break the rules of the norm though, or you might risk going from the wondrous to the absurd, or am I overthinking it here?

I saw suggested in previous posts that raising questions in the reader is a good way to create a sense of wonder. I don't disagree with that, but I also think you have to avoid going too far. There's a difference between questioning how something can be, and questioning that something can be.
If you question how something can be, you have accepted that it is, and you can marvel at the wonder of it. However, if you question that something is at all, then there's doubt rather than wonder, and that's not nearly as marvellous.

For example, Tolkien gives us Lothlorien not from above but from inside. Legoas is happy to be there, Gimli is fearful, Aragorn is pragmatically cautious, and the hobbits are mostly overwhelmed. Those reactions create our sense of wonder. Mallorn trees alone won't do the trick.
Objection!
Again, a bit of a stupid example, and perhaps not applicable to adult readers, but I'll go with it anyway.
My dad read Lord of the Rings to me when I was eight or nine. I remember I was completely awestruck by Lothlorien, but I don't remember anything in detail about how the characters in the story felt about it. What I do remember was that I thought it was really awesome that the elves lived in the trees.

Okay, so it's not really an objection. Showing the characters being in awe works just fine. I can't think of a book at the top of my head (that's not already been mentioned), but I know I've seen it in movies and tv shows, and in those it works great.

So, what am I trying to say?
I think what I'm getting at is that you can create wonder by introducing something that the reader hasn't considered, but which still makes sense within the context of the story. As an eight year old I had no notion that there could be magical people living in trees in a grown up story, but when it actually showed up I was more than willing to accept it, and I thought it was absolutely awesome.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Good comments here. I think I'm hearing an argument that we can create a sense of wonder through sheer description, or even from the concept itself. I'm willing to grant that, but let's hear some specifics. Where has that worked, and why? What magic prose was the author wielding at that point?

Because it's so easy to fail! I cannot count the number of modern (say, post-2000) fantasy books that have had in them all sorts of wonders in them that left me somewhere between bored and mildly interested. The authors tried, but somehow the connection failed. I have theories, but they're all pretty squishy. Maybe the author's voice wasn't strong, so the wonder came off sounding pedestrian, flat. When I think of writers of the fantastic who loom large in my mind, they all have a strong voice. There's a rhythm to their writing (Tolkien and Bradbury are standouts).

Another possibility is that the concept was weak. There were wonders, but mostly it was a matter of scale and not much else. Mountains become big mountains or really, really, big mountains, but that's about it.

Related to this, maybe I'm jaded. The first time I read a story that had a magical world living alongside our mundane one, I was wowed and delighted. After the tenth one, my response is ok, but what else ya got? I'd almost like to say this explanation is sufficient, except that every once in a while I read a treatment of a trope that once again surprises me.

Related once again is that maybe it all depends on the reader. What amazes one will leave another yawning, and perhaps there's no more to this wonder business than that. It would be a comfort to say, write what you will, there are readers for everyone. But it feels like a dodge, somehow, however true it may be.

I dunno. It's a puzzle, wonder is.
 

Heliotrope

Staff
Article Team
When I think of writers of the fantastic who loom large in my mind, they all have a strong voice. There's a rhythm to their writing (Tolkien and Bradbury are standouts).

Another possibility is that the concept was weak. There were wonders, but mostly it was a matter of scale and not much else. Mountains become big mountains or really, really, big mountains, but that's about it.

I have a connection to this, but it is a weird one, so bear with me here.

Recently I watched a funny satire called "Pop Star." It was a funny Judd Apatow movie making fun of pop stars. One of the members of a successful boy band goes solo. He sings this song that is basically just listing items in his jeep. I can't remember exactly how it went, but it was along the lines of:

Water bottle
lighter
spare pair of shoes
gym shirt
red bull can
These are all the things in my jeep.

Because it was a mockumentary, a famous rapper (can't remember who) made the hilarious comment, "I just couldn't really relate to that song because I have different things in my jeep."

What I thought was genius about this was that items alone (big mountains) does make readers (or listeners) connect to a piece, or 'feel' anything. What we need is the emotions (like you are saying). We need the voice, the opinions, the thoughts... if the song had been about how he "FEELS" about the items in his jeep, then the listener could connect, because they have similar feelings about the items in their jeep... even if they are not the same items. It is not the items that matter, it is the emotions around them.

It is emotions that connects readers to a scene, or a description. I think you are correct in that the better the voice, the better the sense of wonder (or whatever.)
 
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So many wonderful observations in this thread so far! Hmmm...why are they "full" of "wonder"?

I'm going to pull some out, mix and match from everyone.

That, for me, is wonder. It is that sense of "how?" The question.

This is probably true. There's an odd conundrum trying to isolate what wonder means. I wonder what it means.

Obviously, something about the appearance of that word and the comments surrounding it has yet to be written, or I wouldn't wonder about it.

An awful (!) lot of people nowadays don't wonder why the sun rises in the East—because they already know why—but some do still, like young children and anyone else who for whatever reason has never thought about it before.

I think "how" is not the right word. It's one instance, or one question. "What now" might be another—wondering about the implications. Again, this means something is left without explication.

In regards to monsters, creatures etc, I have heard the advice "Don't show it until the end, or even better, don't show it at all." Let the reader's imagination do the work. Show what the beast is capable of. Show the damage it does. Show the fear it instills, but don't show it. Leave it to the reader. I think in most cases this is true.

There might be some question of why it is doing these things, why it exists, and so forth. Or how. On the other hand, if we are shown what it can do, the damage it causes, the fear it instills, then the question might become "What now? What comes next?" There might still be a lingering question of "Why is it doing this?" or "How is it doing this?" but there might not. I think of the Alien movies. The first movie took its time revealing the various details, like how it hibernates in a body and its acid blood and how it gets around. But at some point, and in following movies, we get all that. It's still terrifying because we are wondering what comes next. We are wondering how the humans, particularly Ripley, will survive all that. We are wondering about the implications.

So beyond the issue of monsters...I think this works for other things that can happen in a story. We can be shown the full scope of something unexpected, then be left hanging, wondering about the implications.

These are still questions, and wonder seems to provoke those questions.

What you want to do is provide enough factual information to hint at something much bigger, but then never reveal the whole thing. Tell only what is needed, but leave the rest unsaid. The emotional expectations of what the unseen parts could be are what makes something magical.

I think this goes back to the Auden & Williams quotes I included earlier. With wonder, there's a bigger significance only hinted but not made explicit. Two light dancing steps by a girl may...appear to be what all the Schoolmen were trying to express...but two quiet steps by an old man may seem like the very speech of hell. Or the other way around. This, also, makes me wonder whether the showing of the wondrous thing, in all its glory, can work well because sometimes that button is pushed: An answer that delivers something the reader wasn't expecting whatsoever but now seems like the answer to the Universe. (At least, to the World of that story.) This is when something clicks, finally, and we find the answer, or implication, to be something wondrous.

You may have to be careful not to push it too far and break the rules of the norm though, or you might risk going from the wondrous to the absurd, or am I overthinking it here?

I don't think you are overthinking. This is something I hadn't considered, and it seems important.

There's a similar sort of thing: oversaturation. This seems to happen a lot in some movies, where the director piles on absurdity after absurdity as if a profusion will make the movie more wondrous but with the result of making the whole thing absurd.

An example. I recently had a marathon session (broken into two parts) watching the first two seasons of the show Into the Badlands on Netflix. I loved the first season so much, I could hardly wait to jump into the second. But too much became repetitive. Primarily, the OTT fighting which I loved in the first season was carried over to the second, but I felt that a) nothing particularly new for the fighting was introduced, and b) the implications, the meanings, the consequences of each fight didn't ring any important bells for me relating to the unfolding of the plot. Just, more of the same. In fact, some of the choreography seemed to have been phoned in compared to the first season. (There were other problems with the season, but I'll leave them for another thread.)

My dad read Lord of the Rings to me when I was eight or nine. I remember I was completely awestruck by Lothlorien, but I don't remember anything in detail about how the characters in the story felt about it. What I do remember was that I thought it was really awesome that the elves lived in the trees.

Okay, so it's not really an objection. Showing the characters being in awe works just fine. I can't think of a book at the top of my head (that's not already been mentioned), but I know I've seen it in movies and tv shows, and in those it works great.

This question has been bugging me since the start of the thread—in part due to the fact I have had this sort of question in mind for a couple years, and more strongly as those years have progressed!

The difference between cinema and prose.

Movies certainly have an advantage in being so grounded in moving images. An awful lot of what can seem wondrous in a movie or television show may be more difficult to achieve in prose without screwing up the pacing, unless the writer in an adept. This greater ease in the visual medium is a double edged sword however. First, that issue of oversaturation and absurdity is a danger. Second, a director can lean on the visuals as a crutch and fail to polish other things like the plot, characters, etc.

But my interest in the difference between cinema and prose arises from another issue. Cinema and television are third person. [Edit: I mean, a distant third person.] I think maybe another term has arisen lately, cinematic third or some such. With respect to the issue of wonder, this means that we are not really left to feel wonder only if a character first experiences that wonder. We can sit back and be filled with wonder. Aside from the issue of CGI effects and wondrous worlds, many movies exist that don't use those and still give us the sense of wonder. At least, they do for me. The characters in those worlds may be quite inured to their worlds and situations or lacking in a sense of wonder themselves, and I can still be left with a sense of wonder watching them going through whatever they are going through.

So I tend to object to the notion that we can only experience wonder through the characters' sense of wonder.

The sort of intimate third approach that seems to be the heavy favorite (after first person, I suppose) is relatively new, at least by degree. That's not my normal mode so...hah, I feel a little at a disadvantage. This is probably why this question has so obsessed me.

As with cinema, I think there's a potential danger in filtering all that through a character's reaction to things. I can't count the number of times that a book fell quite flat for me despite the fact that the author had a character running around agog at what's happening in her own life. I can't name any specifics off the top of my head because I've always put those books down without advancing far, and put them out of my mind, hah. An analogy would be something like those Wizards in the Harry Potter world that are shown to be filled with wonder about Muggle technology. There is a Haha effect, because I, the reader, do not find the telephone or whatever to be wondrous. Those truly negative examples I've actually tried reading did this same sort of thing. The events in the book, the world in that book, the characters in the book weren't wondrous at all, but the MC is all melodramatic and in a state of "wonder" about them.

Caveat: What I find wondrous about the Harry Potter Wizard experience is not the things they find wondrous about the Muggle world, but rather that they could have lived such a long life in our world and never encountered those things! How can such people exist in our world? What must their world, their daily lives be like for them to have never encountered a telephone or whatever? (I can't remember off the top of my head the exact technology, etc., used in the books, so I'm using telephone as a mere example.) So Rowling accomplished something wonderful. I use that metaphor above merely to give an idea of what I mean.

This issue of "through the characters" or not also makes me wonder about earlier fiction before the rise of intimate third as one dominant form of fiction. An awful lot of literature existed before. I wonder about the Greek tragedies and people being filled with wonder about the events in the Odyssey. Or much later fiction after the printing press was invented but before intimate third became The Thing (tm).

This isn't to say that using characters to help increase the sense of wonder is a bad thing, not at all. I just think it's not the only thing. I do think it is probably much easier using that method—hence, why I'm fumbling around trying to get a grip on other methods. Easy does not mean bad, and difficult does not mean better. (And I don't want to argue about "easy," because I do think doing anything exceptionally well is hard, especially also for anyone still learning the ropes, as I am.)
 
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I think of the Alien movies. The first movie took its time revealing the various details, like how it hibernates in a body and its acid blood and how it gets around. But at some point, and in following movies, we get all that.

Tried to edit, found I'd reached the word limit. :eek:

I'd modify "we get all that" to "we accept it as an enduring unknown" or even better, "we realize the question doesn't matter anymore."
 
Good comments here. I think I'm hearing an argument that we can create a sense of wonder through sheer description, or even from the concept itself. I'm willing to grant that, but let's hear some specifics. Where has that worked, and why? What magic prose was the author wielding at that point?

I think context, developments, and so forth can work sometimes.

I've been wanting to ask a question since my first comment in this thread, but kept forgetting to include it.

What about the romance genre?

:ROFLMAO:

Do regular readers of romance feel any wonder at all? I am guessing yes. I've read some and felt wonder. But the romance I've read also was SF or fantasy, so...But I don't think the wonder in the romance I've read was entirely wrapped up in the presentation of fantastic elements in the fantasy or SF worlds but revolved more around the question of how these two can possibly get together and how they can present a unified force in this world, how they can (and do) overcome the obstacles.

Then there are examples of characters who presented one way, let's say an evil or at least hostile character, who suddenly are revealed to have a good streak and have a rich, hitherto unexpected past. This can be a wondrous thing.

I think that focus on the idea of sheer description perhaps locates the wondrous aspects in the world/environment; but, there may be other places to look for the wondrous?

I'm not sure how to isolate "the concept itself" because I think that phrase might describe what I've mentioned above re: romance or sudden, unexpected revelations about a character. Did you mean something else?
 
I'll throw myself into the ring here.

I find wonder kind of hard to approach when writing, possibly because I am not the greatest caliber of writer and I can't always find the way to word it to evoke what I want with it. Much less how I imagine it going in my head, be it a miles long spaceship or a world tree sent up in flames or gazing upon an elf or facing the gun of an armored trooper. I want to get it and has been noted, the movies have a better way of evoking it at times. I'd like to be able to get there, I at times feel I come up short.


What about the romance genre?

:ROFLMAO:

Do regular readers of romance feel any wonder at all? I am guessing yes.

Maybe, for me when it comes to the romance genre it's not so much wonder. For me in them, it's about the characters, their drives and ambitions and the eventual romantic entanglement. Not sure it's wonder or not, just the want of a happy ending. At least for me. Then I've always kind of been more of a character focused sort.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
Another angle: voice.

I'd like to believe that once you get comfortable enough with your writer's voice, your own emotions will start to shine through in what you write. A reader who's in tune with your voice will pick up on this, and the sense of wonder you wrote with will rub off on them as they read it.
 

Chessie2

Staff
Article Team
Another angle: voice.

I'd like to believe that once you get comfortable enough with your writer's voice, your own emotions will start to shine through in what you write. A reader who's in tune with your voice will pick up on this, and the sense of wonder you wrote with will rub off on them as they read it.
Can we also bring into perspective the idea that a sense of wonder might also entail immersion in the story?

EDIT: To answer your question, Skip, I think about entertainment and clear prose more than anything when I write. It's just me and the story. I focus on keeping the reader as hooked as possible. Sense of wonder and all the other stuff...that is for the reader to figure out. Weird, yeah. It's just that for me, writing the best story I can possibly write means that I have to shut everything and everyone else out. I want my story to be pure and true to the idea in my head. If I'm constantly thinking about other details then I lose sight of where I'm going and writing becomes laborious instead of fun.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
Can we also bring into perspective the idea that a sense of wonder might also entail immersion in the story?
That's probably even a primary requirement. If you're not immersed in the story, you're not going to be awed by what's going on in it.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
>I want my story to be pure and true to the idea in my head.
That would work for me if the idea in my head was pure and true. Alas, it's usually foggy and fickle (which would be excellent names for comedic sidekicks). I don't really stay immersed in the story, but I do in the scene. When I'm hip deep in writing a specific scene, especially when it's working well, I'm feeling the emotions of the scene. My chief challenge is to avoid my tendency to rush through scenes, just to get another one down, which ends up being like playing a tune without the grace notes. It's all there, but it doesn't swing.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
What I'm trying to provoke into thought is that perhaps they might be the same thing. No?
It's a good thought, but spontaneously I don't buy it - but maybe with a bit more thought into it I will.

I believe you can have immersion without wonder, but not the other way around.

Immersion to me is about accepting buying into and accepting the story for what it is. It's about consuming the story without being reminded it's a story. This doesn't necessarily have to fill me with a sense of wonder, but it's still a very pleasant feeling - I'm sure we've all experienced it and would love for our readers to find the same experience in our stories.

Wonder, then, comes on top of that. The icing on the cake if you will.
You can eat icing from a bowl with a spoon, but it's just not the same as enjoying a good cake.
 

Chessie2

Staff
Article Team
I like your version better. For a moment there I wondered if they could be linked as the same thing but the way you've explained it makes more sense. Wonder, then, could be established by immersion first. Awe is what would fill your readers and I dare say that it would be difficult to sustain this throughout an entire book. Can wonder be reserved for certain scenes? Certain parts but not the whole shebang?
 
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