This is an excellent post! Possibly especially so because this very week I have found myself struggling with this particular problem.
Haengma is an excellent metaphor for the thing you describe. Every writer is working in that tradeoff. For me, one of the things that separates a decent book from an excellent book is S-tier haengma that works on a subconscious level. This works in go, too, I think (certainly it does in chess): a bold pawn push that just feels right, even if you can't immediately logically justify it. The dreadful lemon sky is indeed an excellent example, a metaphor that connects with us on some deep level even if we would struggle to explain in coherent full sentences what a dreadful lemon sky truly means.
I think this kind of play is even more critical in genre fiction, where the haengma is often supposed to signpost some thing that doesn't exist in our world. We have the Color out of Space. What Color? Out of what Space? But it just feels unnerving, it unbalances the reader and puts them on guard, has their finger wavering just a little as they turn the page as they fret to learn what horrors the Color conceals. Or, to use a less racist author example, we have orogeny. In haengma terms for me this was a stone way out there in the middle of the board, had me scratching my head. But Jemisin quickly connects it to things that many of us have either experienced or have very strong vivid images of -- (EM DASH) buildings collapsing, wells draining in an instant, communities dying overnight. Suddenly the stone marks bold new territory and everything makes a horrible sense.
Without this tension, this connectivity, the images are no more powerful than benches turning into men. What the best human authors are particularly good at is sussing out this connective tissue and threading it through their work to excite or scare or amuse the reader. I don't know if LLMs are there yet, at least :)
This is an excellent post! Possibly especially so because this very week I have found myself struggling with this particular problem.
Haengma is an excellent metaphor for the thing you describe. Every writer is working in that tradeoff. For me, one of the things that separates a decent book from an excellent book is S-tier haengma that works on a subconscious level. This works in go, too, I think (certainly it does in chess): a bold pawn push that just feels right, even if you can't immediately logically justify it. The dreadful lemon sky is indeed an excellent example, a metaphor that connects with us on some deep level even if we would struggle to explain in coherent full sentences what a dreadful lemon sky truly means.
I think this kind of play is even more critical in genre fiction, where the haengma is often supposed to signpost some thing that doesn't exist in our world. We have the Color out of Space. What Color? Out of what Space? But it just feels unnerving, it unbalances the reader and puts them on guard, has their finger wavering just a little as they turn the page as they fret to learn what horrors the Color conceals. Or, to use a less racist author example, we have orogeny. In haengma terms for me this was a stone way out there in the middle of the board, had me scratching my head. But Jemisin quickly connects it to things that many of us have either experienced or have very strong vivid images of -- (EM DASH) buildings collapsing, wells draining in an instant, communities dying overnight. Suddenly the stone marks bold new territory and everything makes a horrible sense.
Without this tension, this connectivity, the images are no more powerful than benches turning into men. What the best human authors are particularly good at is sussing out this connective tissue and threading it through their work to excite or scare or amuse the reader. I don't know if LLMs are there yet, at least :)