Lesson overview

Detailed practice
Story - Narrative
Middle years and up
science fantasy
worldbuilding
setting
Phoenix
S F Said
sci-fantasy
describing threats
existential threats
cosmic phenomena
tension
scale
showing character emotion
sensory detail
expressive punctuation
sentence length
foreboding
suspense
project
Sometimes in a science fantasy story, you need to pull out all stops with a cosmic enemy or threat with the potential to consume the known world/galaxy/universe. The challenge with this kind of threat is describing something that is both unimaginable but also comprehensible to the reader. This lesson models a passage from Phoenix in which Lucky is terrified by a rift in space. We look at how to describe the threat physically, and then create meaning and tension through character responses.