I'm transported to an alternate reality. In this case, a world based in the 1950's in the impoverished Docklands of London's East Side. An order of Anglican nuns and associated nurse midwives live at Nonnatus House to serve the inhabitants of this slum. The midwives bicycled around the ramshackle area while doing their best to insure safe childbirth and provide home healthcare. Telephones were almost unheard of in private residences and people depended on the ubiquitous red booth. National Health Service had just begun. Life was difficult at best and impossible at worst.
During those years I lived in a small town in the American midwest. Our grandmother had a telephone and our mother had a business phone, but telephones were rare. There was no bicycling for business transportation because distances were much further than in the tenements of London, but we kids walked everywhere. We did not have midwives since American doctoring had extinguished them by then so learning about midwifery and home delivery is all new to me.
In learning about how to portray alternate worlds, if we keep our eyes open, we learn they are all around us. Later in life, I found many when I was a social worker working in a large poverty pocket, and later still when I lived in areas with large Native Alaskan populations. Later again in various areas of urban Boston.
As writers, when we create an alternative world - and they all are alternative to the reader - our prose will require vividness and complexity to draw the reader into that world, whether it is populated by goblins, romantics, midwives, or space aliens.
When we arrive at the door, which path will we take and what will we find on the other side? Can we see it? Feel it? Smell it? What lies outside the door to your alternate reality? What will your readers learn?
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