How to Write the Impossible

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Some things simply cannot be said... but that's kind of our job as writers, write? To use words to say the things which cannot be said? Of course, there are boundaries, even for the best of us. Some things are literally IMPOSSIBLE to write...

But that doesn't mean we won't try.

So here are 10 tricks to help you look the ineffable in the eye... and eff it.

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[TheTaleFoundry]

Watch all our other videos over on Nebula, including an entire video series—Worldmiths—which we haven't released here on youtube!

[joelhaggis]

"Words describing it fail. Pages relating it shrivel. Tales recounting it end." - Nemesis of Reason, Magic the Gathering.

[saigonsquidward]

Someone else mentioned, but wanted to give full context, I also love how this is handled in SCP. For example, in SCP-2264, there's a description of the 'Hanged King' (meant to be sort of like a physical king in yellow) that a maddened soldier gives, and when prompted to describe what its face looked like, he just responds with:


"A god shaped hole. The barren desolation of a fallen and failed creation. You see the light of long dead stars. Your existence is nothing but an echo of a dying god's screams. The unseen converges. Surrounds you. And it tightens like a noose."

Really works with the whole idea of abstraction and omission, we can't know what a 'god-shaped' hole looks like, or what 'unseen' thing is 'converging', but you can almost imagine it based on connotations alone. Really cool for horror.

[Kyrrial]

"The End of the Universe, the funniest joke in the world, Cthulhu: all perfectly ineffible. But hey, that doesn't mean you can't try to eff 'em anyway." That's truly an inspired line. Love it!

[LordNazar]

In a webcomic "Stick in a Mud" a monster introduced himself with a speach bubble full of torture and suffering. To which the protagonist replied: "It kinda sounds like 'Blueberry'. I'm gonna call you Bluberry."

[akun]

When it comes to the moment in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when they get to the Total Perspective machine, I absolutely love the reaction afterwards. Here, on a planet where millions ended their lives, where it was considered a death sentence to even set foot into the machine, the character goes in, walks out and goes, "Wow, yeah, that was cool. Ooh, cake!" For me, it was a perfect moment to undercut the entire mood and defy the supposed despair that "the unknowable" brings. Sometimes, you just have to look at The Ineffable and go, "Yeah, you're cool and all, but this cake here is delicious, so I don't care about you right now."
In a way, it's a beautiful metaphor for how you should handle things when people talk about the grand cosmic scale. Since nothing we do can matter to it, why should it matter to us? Just have some cake and forget about it.

[scouttyra]

One of my favorite instances of a character trying to describe something undescribable is in The Magnus Archives where a woman whose son got taken, and she describes it the best way she can with "the sky ate him..." It's clear that she can't describe it any clearer, and she states that if she thinks of it too closely she gets a headache (iirc).

[EphemeralTao]

One of the best description-by-analogy examples I've ever read was from the classic _A Voyage to Arcturus_ by David Lindsay. The main character has traveled to a planet with twin suns, and experiences two new primary colours -- ulfire and jale.

From the book: ""Just as blue is delicate and mysterious, yellow clear and unsubtle, and red sanguine and passionate, so he felt ulfire to be wild and painful, and jale dreamlike, feverish, and voluptuous."

[hyreonk]

3:01 Admission: State plainly the thing is ineffable.
4:40 Circumscription: Describe the effects of the ineffable rather than the thing itself.
6:50 Magnification: Compare the thing to something already extreme.
8:32 Alienation: Describe how it violates the usual principles of reality.
10:13 Combination: Use a combination of analogies to create a liminal effect.
12:19 Obfuscation: Be vague and ambiguous.
13:57 Abstraction: Use nonsensical descriptions.
15:29 Disorientation: Reference alternative mind states.
17:05 Fictionalization: Lie and exaggerate.
19:20 Omission: Give no description.

[thegreaterpotato]

As someone with epilepsy who occasionally had perceptions that are really hard to describe, I really liked these methods as they tend to be really close to what I often end up with.

[THExRISER]

Funny how H.P. Lovecraft wasn't the best at the very genre he brought into existence.
But that's the thing with pioneers isn't it? They're never the best at what they do, but they are the first, and that's enough to pave a path for the rest of us.

[hanguyenthu]

As my favorite style of writing that my (Vietnamese) literature teachers all said: “Provoke, not describe”. It is not putting the thing into words. It is putting the experience of that thing into words.

The perfect example is “Kieu’s story”. When describing the beauties, Nguyen Du wrote (and I translate): “Clouds are defeated by her hair, and snow surrendered to her skin”. He could have wrote “Hair floats like clouds and skin fair as snow”, but that was not how the beholder *felt*.

[shialtin]

One of my favourite examples of 'omission' in popular culture is from Neil Gaiman, particularly his interpretation of Death in 'The Sandman'. So often threads of the storyline will bring a particular to the threshold of her realm, but because we, the readers, are on *this* side, we never see it.
"So, what happens next?"
"Now's when you get to find out..."
There are only two, arguably three times, in the Sandman cycle that Death gets close to losing her temper. At those moments, universal forces are cowed; what happens when Death is angry?
Again, the question is never answered. We see the petulant strops and tantrums of her siblings, but we never see that *dark* side of Death, and that makes her character all the more compelling. She is so loveable because she is unknowable.

[RoRoGFoodie]

My favorite example of omission is in The Magnus Archives. The things behind every horror we hear about are never described in anything beyond the concept they represent. We will know the horrors they send, the garden of bones, the macabre carousel of identity, the monsters and followers of them. But the only people to gaze upon the actual entities died for it. I Love that.

[zionleach]

I once saw a video saying how being "dumb" in Call of Cthulhu is a super power. Or at least open-minded. In Monster Hunter International having a "flexible mind" gives the characters a chance to not end up in a nut house.
(Edited for grammar)

[franciscol]

I'd like to point out to a recent star wars show called Andor:

An Imperial scientist is using a certain recording to torture a prisioner; this recording is of an alien species the empire conquered in the past, when they die, it is said, they emmit a horrifying sound, and some of the imperial officers oveerseing the whole ordeal where found crying in the floor, the recording used is the isolated sound of the children of the species wich are particularly harmful to the mind.

When the escen occurs, the camera pans towards the prisioner's face, as music takes on a crescendo moments before the recording starts, the face of the prisioner starts painting a light worry grin, while the music gets louder and more intense and we get close to the prisioner's face... silence, nothing but silence as the recording plays, and then the prisioners screams, end of the scene

[DrFranklynAnderson]

I’m reminded of, of all things, “the Noodle Incident” from ‘90s newspaper comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Characters would obliquely reference it as a time the strip’s protagonist got in immense trouble. Creator Bill Watterson was asked to tell the story of the Noodle Incident, but he refused, saying whatever vague impressions the readers came up with in their own minds was far more impressive than anything he’d be able to come up with.

Although I will say, when it comes to Lovecraft, there are times when I prefer him spelling things out rather than just saying a monster was indescribable. “Indescribable” leaves it up to the reader’s mind to envision the monster in their head, and my head isn’t creative enough to invent something as unworldly and bizarre as the anatomical descriptions of the Elder Things or Wilbur Whateley.

[sprt]

People already mentioned above SCP, my favorite example of probably SCP-3125 from Antimemetics division storyline. It can't be described by definition - as soon as you know about it existence - it knows about yours. And it attacks! So most of the description is done through either describing what happens to people who found about it or how SCP teams sidestep all the rules trying to fight something they can't know about.

[MusixSaros]

I was kind of struggling with something I wanted to describe in a story of mine. However, I think you gave me a far better option in leaving it vague, so someone else can try and grasp the situation of it in their own mind.

[wesword]

There are some SCPs that delve into these unknowable worlds. Some of my favourite SCPs are that which talk about Pattern Screamers. Particularly SCP-3426, Reckoner is about when civilizations stumble across a “pattern” that is so completely incomprehensible it bends their reality and minds into non-existence. My favourite line from it is “when you hear the screaming in your mind, be silent until you do not exist” It’s a truly, magnificently terrifying piece and I’d recommend anyone unfamiliar with it to check it out.