Ringwyrm

If anyone has thoughts about how to handle writing information starved scenes, such as anything from the perspective of a newborn or a less than sentient animal (especially a newborn animal), that's the nut I'm trying to crack right now. It's hard to explain things if the point of view character lacks the needed context to understand, so it's been an interesting challenge.

I'm not an astrophysicist, but a chemist, so this comes from a less than ideal background. The key features of a neutron star for nearby objects are the disproportionately large gravitational effect they have for an object of their size, and the tight beams of intense radiation they emit from their magnetic poles (not necessarily their rotational poles, look into pulsars). A neutron star could be an object abut 10 km wide with the gravitational effect of an object double the mass of our sun. A star system with a habitable planet similar to ours is more likely to orbit the neutron star than it is to orbit that planet's star. They form from supernova, which would have obliterated nearby star systems, so it would most likely be an object that orbited in from far away before capturing the planet and star. This would likely make the neutron star a very distant object in human terms. Another possibility is that the neutron star swept up an accretion disk while passing through stellar dust clouds and built the star system around itself. Jupiter is almost massive enough to have become a star, so something not much bigger could provide the 'sun' of this system, but be an interesting case where a habitable planet does not orbit its own sun. This odd configuration might cause a regular cycle of ice ages and global warming much like ordinary winters and summers as 'Jupiter' moved relatively closer or farther over the course of decades. I think the high energy 'lasers' emitted by the magnetic poles would sweep out two cones of space (hopefully outside the orbital path of the planets) which would be utter kill-zones for anything we understand as biology or technology. One could theoretically navigate around the beams, but their precession around the neutron star as it rotates is so fast that the window of entry into those cones of space would only be a few seconds at best. I'm unsure a vessel even could pass through the kill-zone fast enough at sub-light speed.

I've got a conundrum in a story I'm writing. The setting is very weird, a bunch of bird people nesting during their mating season (no humans). It is the start of the story, so it is vital for the reader to quickly be given enough information to understand what is happening. However the adults are reduced to a bestial state during this time, so the only possible point of view characters that are identifiably sentient are the hatchlings themselves. They do not possess much by way of language skills yet. This places reader comprehension largely in opposition to believable characterizations. On top of that, there is no one to give characters names yet so they must be differentiated entirely by description. Without using a fully omniscient narrator and a ton of exposition, veering heavily into 'tell not show', it is proving a difficult scenario to handle. How would others approach this?

Hey all, just a hobby author interested in the Writing Excuses forums. If anyone has thoughts about how to handle writing information starved scenes, such as anything from the perspective of a newborn or a less than sentient animal (especially a newborn animal), that's the nut I'm trying to crack right now. It's hard to explain things if the point of view character lacks the needed context to understand, so it's been an interesting challenge.