Emotional Esperanto

You can visit the remotest human tribe on earth, smile at them, and be understood.

The only universal language is human emotions. You can describe any experience to any person so long as you do it in terms of feelings, not facts. You can even get near to capturing untouchable things like colours and melodies.

That’s how writing works, and it’s what makes it possible to write good sci-fi and fantasy. It should be impossible to describe a world that neither the author nor the reader has ever experienced, but it isn’t. Because in actual fact, the good fantasy writer doesn’t describe an unfamiliar world, but a world that everyone knows intimately: the world of human emotions, just cast in a different mould. You write not what is, but how it feels.