Deepening stories

Last weekend I was away on a writing retreat with my friend Christine Hammacott.  On of my tasks for the weekend was to turn a short story into a novella.  I already had two versions of the short story, written some years ago.  When I  read them through they seemed sketchy, and disjointed in some places.  The didn't flow the action, and I hadn't described the world of the story adequately.

This is one of my continuing faults.  I tend to skim over long descriptions or detailed pictures of settings in other people's works, but it's only in recent years that I've realised I do the same in my own work. Which, given that I'm a science fiction writer, and have to invent the whole world of my story, is somewhat of a problem.

Every writer has some area of writing they're weaker at, and for me that's description.  I'm so keen not to create info-dumps that I'm cheating the reader of necessary location clues.  This fault would be bad enough if I was writing about the world everybody knows.  If I refer to the Eiffel Tower or the White House, chances are most people know where those are and what they look like.  And if you don't, a quick five minutes with Google will show you images and location.  But I'm writing about invented planets, and nothing can be taken for granted.  I have started to train myself to deepen my stories by adding richer description.  I tend to let the dialogue and action carry the story, but I do need to set those things in a place.

Turning to characters in conflict, I often have one who disagrees with the other but doesn't show that in their dialogue.  So I need some way of showing the reader that they're annoyed, or they disagree.  This is when describing body language, someone looking away or tensing up, comes in.  It's back to putting in more description again.

In the novella I'm now writing the original version has some description of this top-security facility, but it doesn't place it in its setting outside.  And given that it's a hidden underground complex whose entrances are disguised by waterfalls of foliage, that's quite an omission.  Then there's the meadow that separates the entrance from the road.  What colours are the flowers there?  I don't know, and I need to know.

I find writing this kind of detailed description, inventing it, the hardest to do.  Alien creatures I'll gleefully describe in great detail.  But the places they live in?  Not so much.  I must do better.