Get Started in Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

How to write compelling and imaginative sci-fi and fantasy fiction

Adam Roberts

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781444795660
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

YOUR COMPLETE GUIDE TO WRITING AWESOME AND AMAZING FICTION FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION.This is an authoritative and engaging introduction to writing science fiction and fantasy for the complete beginner. This book provides all the information, guidance, and advice you need to write great science fiction to captivate your readers. It will help you understand how the genre works, the big dos and don'ts - as well as giving you the inspiration and motivation you actually need to write. Written by a leading science fiction novelist and a Professor in Creative Writing at the University of London - you'll discover how to let your creativity flow, create incredible worlds, and get your novel finished. ABOUT THE SERIES
The Teach Yourself Creative Writing series helps aspiring authors tell their story. Covering a range of genres from science fiction and romantic novels, to illustrated children's books and comedy, this series is packed with advice, exercises and tips for unlocking creativity and improving your writing. And because we know how daunting the blank page can be, we set up the Just Write online community at tyjustwrite, for budding authors and successful writers to connect and share.

1

How to write

Let’s not beat around the bush. I’ll start by laying out the whole truth and secret of successful writing in words of (with two exceptions) one syllable. There’s a bronze, a silver and a gold rule to writing, and here they are:

• Bronze rule: You must write, and finish what you write.

• Silver rule: You must revise what you write.

• Gold rule: Show, don’t tell.

If you bear with me, I’ll explain in more detail why these seemingly bland bromides are so very, very important.

You may be nodding sagely at these three ‘rules’; or you may be tutting with annoyance that such how-to book clichés should be foisted on you so early on – you may believe that the very idea of rules is a ridiculous straightjacket and that all rules should be repudiated. If so, bravo! More power to you. I think you’re wrong, and below I explain why I think that. But you don’t have to listen to me – provided, only, that you have found a workable way of getting from ‘ideas in your head’ to ‘finished written product that people love’.

You must write, and finish what you write

The bronze rule is perhaps so obvious as to not even need stating, except that there are many people in this world who prefer the idea of being a writer to the practical business of actual writing. Not you: you know better. But you know the type I’m talking about: the people who daydream about reclining on their yacht, casting an idle eye over their latest masterpiece which is topping the bestseller list. Or, to be less hyperbolic, they are the people who fancy meeting others at dinner parties and saying ‘Me, oh, I’m a writer’ and basking in their admiration. You are not so foolish as to indulge such nonsense. You know that writing is not a very efficient route to multi-millions; and that if it is money you are after, there are many better ways of getting it.

Nonetheless, there is a version of this evasion particularly common to science fiction – the individual who is happiest planning what she is going to write, rather than actually writing it. In science fiction this can take the form not only of drawing up detailed chapter breakdowns, but of drawing maps and star charts, inventing alien languages and sketching cool futuristic laser rifles and spaceships. All these things may well have a place in your story, but doodling around your story, even with the best intentions, is not a substitute for writing your story.

One of the crucial things that makes science fiction different from other kinds of writing is that it can play with big ideas and include cool imaginary kit.

But books are not made out of ideas.

Books are not made out of imagined worlds, or cool spaceships, or robots, or time machines.

Books are not made out of characters, however carefully you establish their family tree and sketch out their physical appearance.

Books are not made out of feelings, or convictions, or events.

Books are made out of words.

I’ll repeat that. Books are made out of words.

We can be more specific: books are made out of the words the reader reads.

A writer is somebody who writes. The uncomfortable aspect of this truth is that, if you aren’t writing (when you are playing goofing off, but even when you are planning and sketching and daydreaming about writing), you aren’t a writer. But there’s an upside too: as soon as you start putting words next to one another you are a writer, right up there with Tolstoy, J.K. Rowling and your favourite SF author. And while quite a lot of this book will be about encouraging you to treat ‘rules’ with a healthy suspicion, here is one rule that is engraved upon tablets of ultra stone and must not be broken. Write! Write as often as you can. Get into a routine that works for you – find a time of day (morning, afternoon, night-time after the kids have been put to bed, 45 minutes during your lunch break, whenever), arrange whatever aids you need (a cup of coffee, an extra strong mint, a pan-galactic gargle-blaster), pick up your pen, open your laptop and put the words down. Do whatever you need to do to make this happen: some writers like to tweet or Facebook their #amwriting daily totals; some are more private. It doesn’t matter how you write; it doesn’t even matter (in the first instance) what you write. It only matters that you write.

Write but a page a day, and by the end of the year you will have produced a 365-page novel. In fact, if you’d started a year ago, you’d already have written your novel! Think back in time to a year ago today: what was happening that meant you couldn’t draft a page a day from that time until now? Nothing, right? So there’s no reason to put it off any longer.

H.G. Wells

‘I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.’

‘What about writer’s block?’ I hear you ask. And my answer is: ‘There is no such thing as writer’s block.’ That statement might seem to fly in the face of common sense. It might even look callous to people who are struggling to get the words down. But it’s true, nonetheless. Think about it: do you think carpenters get ‘carpenter’s block’? Do hairdressers get ‘hairdresser’s block’? Do taxi drivers get taxi-driver block? (‘Take me to 227 Playfair Street’, ‘I’d love to, sir, I really would; but I’m just feeling really blocked about my driving at the moment …’) Writing is an art, but it is an art built upon craft; and craftspeople don’t get craftsperson’s block.

‘But writing is different!’ you say, and you add an exclamation mark for emphasis.

And, of course, it is.

The key to banishing ‘writer’s block’ is to understand what it is. It is not the fear of the blank page, the awful chasm of existential disempowerment, the ‘I can’t think what to say until the muse moves me.’ The word for that sort of thinking is ‘self-indulgence’. (This may look like two words, but I consider the hyphen to meld the two components into one.) If that has been your problem, then you’re in luck! The book you hold in your hand is filled with exercises, workshop tasks and specific ideas of what to write. By concentrating on those, instead of on yourself, you will work through whatever is holding you up.

But self-indulgence isn’t the same thing as writer’s block. The block is something else. It is that little voice in your head that chimes in as you finish a sentence, the voice that states ‘Well, that’s not a very good sentence; the voice that says: ‘They’re all going to laugh at you for writing such garbage’; that says: ‘Better give up before you make things worse.’ As a result, you stare into space feeling like a fraud and a failure; or else you spend three hours wrestling with the sentence in an increasingly desperate attempt to lick it into shape.

Focus point

One of the main strategies of SF is the literalization of metaphor. Take something that is in normal usage only a figure of speech and imagine how it would work as an actual thing: how would our current world have to change to accommodate it? How would people handle it? ‘Writer’s block’ is one such. What would a literal writer’s block look like?

Imagine, say, a future where writers are linked via brain implants to a central information processing system; and where any unspeakable ideas are blocked with a literal neuronal block at the point of origin. How might a writer get past that? Let’s say she manages to, and her expression of the unspeakable triggers the blocks in all the other writers, leaving her the only writer supplying the complaisant global audience of story-suckers? How might she use that power – for personal gain, or something more idealistic? How would the system kick back?

That’s not the way. The way is to silence that voice.

Everybody has that voice. All writers have to deal with it, no matter how fluent or successful they seem to the outside world. Indeed, in its place it’s a good and necessary thing, The Voice, provided only that it comes at the right time in the process. When you are revising your work, you need to listen to your inner critic. But when you are writing your work, you must on no account let The Voice undermine you.

To speak for myself, I silence The Voice by listening to music while I write; I’m not sure how, but it holds the inner critic at bay long enough for me to get my first draft down. Other writers find other ways of ignoring it, with whatever version of ‘Yes, yes, I’ll get to your objections later’ is effective for them.

You can take strength and comfort from this crucial piece of wisdom: writing your first draft commits you to nothing. Everything is still up for grabs, even when your draft is the 365-page chunk of text that your year’s investment of lunch-break scribbling has produced. You can buy The Voice off with this truth: maybe the sentence you just wrote is rubbish. If it is, it doesn’t matter, because you’ll catch it on the second pass, when you are revising what you have written. Because ‘writing’ is a two-part process; and that two-part combines bronze and silver rules in one central truth:

First you get it written; then you get it right.

The beauty of this slogan is not only that it frees you from the imaginary tentacles of ‘writer’s block’; it is that when you do go back to revise what you have previously written you discover, eight times out of ten, that the sentence you thought so hideous is actually fine. Actually works pretty well. Is actually pretty exciting.

Writers all share this one truth (that they write) – but they find a glorious diversity of ways of actualizing it. Some like to plan carefully, wi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents 
• About the author
• How to use this book
• 1 How to write
• 2 What are science fiction and fantasy? (And what does that mean about how you write them?)
• 3 How to have original ideas
• 4 How to structure your story
• 5 Storytelling
• 6 Writing well: description and dialogue
• 7 Writing character
• 8 Seven key SF and fantasy tropes
• 9 Revising
• 10 Getting published
• Appendix: SF Plotto
• Copyright