There aren’t many novels about scuba diving. And among the few that exist, even the ones that fall squarely within the dive niche, actual diving scenes tend to be scarce or the dive itself passes quickly and doesn’t really feel like a dive.
I used to wonder why. When I write magazine features, the underwater scenes are the most fun. They’re what I lean into for description, for atmosphere, for giving readers a genuine sense of place. Why wouldn’t novelists do the same? Fiction has more room for it after all. My dive articles, by comparison, are often highly constrained for space.
Then I tried writing dive scenes in my own fiction, and I understood the problem. It was hard. Much harder than writing a non-fiction diving scene, for one thing it wasn’t just about giving a sense of place. It had to do so much more.
A major constraint to writing engaging underwater scenes is the fact that you can’t have dialogue underwater. Hollywood has solved this by giving divers full-face masks with comms, incidentally a piece of equipment most recreational divers will never touch because they chew through air, the comms are still really bad, and they require additional training and practice. Though you could give your fictional characters full-face masks, you’d be copping out in the same way Hollywood does. And yes, I know. In fiction, as in movies, dialogue carries a lot of weight. It moves story. It paces action. It externalizes character. Strip it out, and what’s left is description, interiority, and gesture.
So, how do you do it well? How do you write dive scenes where there is no dialogue and that are still as riveting as a topside scene?
This is what I’ve learned. A dive scene asks you to lean entirely on the otherworldly feeling of being down there, to describe, physically and mentally what it’s like to be underwater. After all, finning 200 yards across the silt feels nothing like walking 200 yards down the block. For one thing, you’re able to move in any direction, for another, it’s a whole body feeling. There’s resistance, there’s the silky feel of water against your skin, there’s the sound of the regulator, a sort of white noise that causes nearby fish to burst away from you with each exhale. Walking down the block is different. When I do that I focus on the feeling of wind or the cloying heat, on the sound of the birds, on the smell of flowering jasmine, wafting briefly by.
What I had to remember to write better underwater scenes in fiction was the feeling. Not the equipment, not the marine life, not the conditions (though sometimes those too as the relate to feeling), but the actual physical feeling of diving. I wrote about it once years ago on my blog, Scuba Scribbles, only because my mother suggested it after I’d tried to convey the same thing to my family. Then again, a couple of years ago, I wrote about what it feels like to dive deep (a different feeling still).
Even before I worked as an assistant for the nature writer Barry Lopez, I’d read something he wrote about the feeling of diving in his book About This Life. I recall bookmarking it as a favorite quote on Goodreads, back when that was a thing one could easily do. Today, it still serves as a reminder of what is important to convey about diving, an activity that is mental, physical and I’d dare to argue, spiritual:
“Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.”
Once I started trying to write about how my characters felt, physically and emotionally as they dived, my scenes improved. They got easier to write, and, more surprisingly, they became fun.
I don’t think I’ve cracked the secret sauce yet but I’m on the way.
