Let’s talk a bit about immersion.
In your story, the purpose of immersion is to give your readers a feel for what’s actually going on, regardless of whether words are spoken.
There are two schools of thought on what immersion actually means; and unfortunately, they lead authors down very different paths.
One school of thought maintains that in order to immerse the reader in the story, the author must provide as much detail as possible: the color of the sky, the weight of the space pistol, the darkness of the alleyway where the shootout takes place.
The other school says, “Dammit, make me feel something.”
In a sense, the two aren’t incompatible. You can use both: Spaceman Spiff can be in an alleyway that’s pitch black (a very specific color), so black that that the light from the planet’s three moons is blinding when he steps out into it (a feeling, or at least feeling-adjacent). But it’s how those two get combined that defines an individual author’s own immersive style.
The one thing you don’t want to do, however, is immerse your audience in raw data. There’s nothing to be gained from knowing that the surface of Planet Boffo Prime is 73 degrees F, has 0.13 inches of annual rainfall, or that the nitrogen mix in the atmosphere, while breathable, is incredibly high due to the planet’s 1.3X Earth gravity and the weight of its dense atmosphere.
Unless that affects your characters, no one gives a damn, and it’s just geeking out on the fact that you love—and live—meteorology.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t go unapologetically into your massive jungle-world, give the reader the briefest of tours, then strap them in and hit the gas. If your aliens speak Xaclitl, then have them speak Xaclitl, not English. Just keep in mind that communicating the alienness first-hand is going to make storytelling a little harder.
Walter M. Miller Jr., author of the SF classic A Canticle for Liebowitz, employed such hyper-immersion to great effect. The monks in his story who protected what was left of technological civilization spoke Latin because it was the common language of the Church. They never spoke a single word of English, except perhaps to those who didn’t speak Latin. It was the reader’s job to go look up what all the Latin meant.
In a way, diving off the deep end forces you to communicate what your characters are feeling through other means: facial or bodily expressions, posture, or actions.
Which brings me back to my main point: that immersion is there to say what words cannot.
There’s a little exercise in Improv comedy called Gibberish. Players have to act out a scene with a setting chosen by the audience without using words. If they’re nervous, they have to communicate it with posture and facial expressions. If they’re hot, they have to pantomime wiping sweat off their forehead and pull their sweat-soaked shirts away from their torsos. It’s a great way to get around using dialogue and dry description as crutches.
Make me feel something, dammit. Break my heart, scare the bejeezus out of me, I don’t care. Just rip the warm, comfy sheets off my 9-to-5 life and make me feel alive.
As an author, I’m communicating something intangible and ineffable when I tell you that after four days of trekking along cracked roadways and donkey trails leading through the parched wasteland that used to be Tennessee, something really bad happened. I know it did. I’m already imagining just how bad it was, and how far away good watering holes are. I don’t have to tell you there was an apocalypse, because you can feel it. If I’m doing my job right, you’re sitting there with the one light on in the living room long after sunset, tearing through pages and hoping that bandits don’t get our hero before he hand-delivers his message of hope to the last vestiges of technological civilization huddled around a failing power plant somewhere on the far north coast of the Independent Sovereignty of Maine.
The difference between the two styles of immersion lies in feelings. Words can evoke those feelings, but they cannot replace them.
Immersing your readers in your characters’ feelings—and their reasons for feeling that way—creates a bond. It’s easier to be sympathetic with someone taking great risk or making an otherwise unfathomable mistake when you can feel why they acted the way they did.
No amount of specificity in the colorshade of the night as Spaceman Spiff lurks in the darkness of the alleyway on Boffo Prime, awaiting the first words of Xaclitl to be spoken by his adversary, will ever communicate why the faint crackling sound in the distance startled our hero, causing him to lose his balance and prematurely discharge his weapon, killing the Ulolian Prelate he was supposed to protect from ambush.
If you’re going to sell me the adventure, don’t just hand me the brochure. I want to jump out of my seat, laugh, cry, go insane, and feel the rush of the wind on my face.
