A Failure of The Imagination

In the dark of night a carriage comes trundling through a narrow medieval street.

How many times have we read that scene? I have written it at least five times.

In my mind I tend to see – at least if I don’t think about it – a narrowish street and a serviceable dark wood carriage. Which, of course, is fine if it’s a secret meeting – I wrote that once. But what about when your character is about to be taken up onto the lap of luxury and the refined haunts of nobility?

I confess I’ve once or twice made reference to gilded carriages and left it at that. It took a visit last week to the museum of carriages in Lisbon to make me realize how even I – who grew up, as my older son put it in a country surrounded by (and chained to and weighted down by) the past – often failed in imagination, and how it might fail to convey the sheer weirdness of a setting to readers.

And the setting is not just historical, either. There is no reason to believe the current fetish for form following function will endure. We could well end up with spaceships that look somewhat like this, inside or even out. (Given innovative materials.)

In the absence of clues from the writer that something is not as-in-present the reader tends to default to bare-bones past (assuming always the past was simpler, particularly for US readers) or to Star-Trek future. I try very hard to at least cue other possibilities, but I’m not sure how successful I am. The past – and the future – are truly different countries and sometimes imagination lags behind them.

Which authors do this sort of thing well? Are you even aware when it is lacking? Do you prefer barest of bare bones and let you fill-in the environment yourself? Do you feel more comfortable with a future or a past that are somewhat like the present? Do you want more “authenticity?” Is anything – narrative – served by more authenticity?