Since I’ve been trav­el­ing, I’m revis­it­ing a post from 2010 about mak­ing sure we’re aware of the real­i­ties of light.

Light is impor­tant when we’re writing—and I’m not talk­ing about hav­ing enough light to work by. I’m talk­ing about how much we can describe in our scenes. One of my cri­tique part­ners ques­tioned a scene I’d written:

She stepped inside and closed the door behind them. Plac­ing her fore­fin­ger over her lips, she shook her head before he could speak. She unbut­toned the top but­ton of his shirt. Then walked her fin­gers to the sec­ond, slid­ing the disc through the slit in the fab­ric. Then to the third, then the next, until she’d laid the plaid flan­nel open, reveal­ing the tight-fitting black tee she’d seen at the pond this morn­ing when he’d given her the shirt off his back.

His com­ment: It’s night. Do you need to show one of them turn­ing on a light?

I don’t know … more about that later.

In a book I read some years back, the author had made a point of a total power fail­ure on a moon­less night. There was no source of light, and the pitch-blackness of the scene was a way for the hero and hero­ine to have to get “closer” since they couldn’t see. As I recall, there was bro­ken glass on the floor, and the hero­ine was bare­foot. Because they couldn’t see, the hero had to carry her to avoid step­ping on more glass.

It didn’t take long for them to end up in bed, but some­how, he was able to see the color of her eyes as they made love. I don’t know whether the author had for­got­ten she’d set up the scene to have no light, or if she didn’t do her own ver­i­fy­ing of what you can and can’t see in total dark­ness. Yes, our eyes will adapt to dim light, but there has to be some source of light. If you’ve ever taken a cave tour, you’ll know there’s no adapt­ing to that kind of darkness.

We want to describe our scenes, we want our read­ers to ‘see’ every­thing, but we have to remem­ber to keep it real. This might mean doing some per­sonal testing—when you wake up before it’s fully light, or when you turn off the light to go to sleep, check to see how much you can actu­ally ‘see’. Wait for your eyes to adapt, and check again. The abil­ity to see color drops off quickly. So even if you see your hands, or the chair across the room, or the pic­ture on the wall, how much light do you need before you can leave the realm of black and white?

In the para­graph I used as an exam­ple, I didn’t think I needed to stop to turn on a light. In most set­tings, there’s always some light. We noticed when we moved up here, where there are no street lights, that there’s very lit­tle night light pol­lu­tion, which gives us amaz­ing stars, but in this time of elec­tron­ics, almost every­thing that plugs in has some sort of light on.

The only color men­tioned in my exam­ple para­graph was the black t-shirt, which would look black at night even if it was red, or blue, or green. It’s also likely the hero’s shirt wasn’t but­toned totally to his neck, so she might also have seen it peek­ing out. I did men­tion his plaid shirt, but the hero­ine had seen that before they went upstairs. How­ever, too much dwelling on that kind of expla­na­tion would have totally slowed the pace. I’m think­ing I don’t need more light in that scene. What about you?