As I mentioned in my first article, I’m big on genre fiction. I love an interesting fantasy world and can get really lost in a good science fiction piece, even well after I’ve put the thing down. That said, science fiction is a really broad genre, and there are all sorts of possibilities within it. If you’re having trouble or you just want some ideas on how to approach the genre in general, I’ve got you covered. Here are my six tips for writing science fiction.
Hard or Soft?
Science Fiction. For those seasoned science fiction readers, this is often one of the first questions asked when considering a new story that pops up on one’s radar. If you’re not already familiar with these terms, this is essentially how the science fiction community differentiates pieces of science fiction that conform closely to the natural laws of physics and the universe, that makes these laws central and important to the plot and always carefully considers them (hard sci-fi), and pieces of science fiction that only loosely follow them or have no reverence for them whatsoever (soft sci-fi). Isaac Asimov is probably the most notable hard science fiction writer, and Star Wars is possibly the most notable example of soft science fiction (and some might argue it’s not even that, but that is a whole other debate).
Get Familiar with the Genre
All of this talk of Asimov and hard versus soft science fiction brings us very close to my next point. This is perhaps the most obvious advice here, but I encounter a surprising number of people who are interested in writing in a genre who don’t do very much reading within it. Typically, they watch a lot of TV and movies, and I think that can do a lot of the same things for you that reading does, but at the same time, I would argue that it’s still no substitute. Seeing the work of published authors can really clue you into stylistic decisions and conventional wisdom that they follow, even if you don’t fully understand everything that they’re doing at first, finding a handful of writers whose style you enjoy and taking cues from them can help immensely in growing your understanding on the intangible “feel” a genre has.
Read Modern Science
Just like you can learn style and conventions from reading contemporary science fiction, you can obtain all sorts of ideas and inspiration from contemporary science. A lot of science fiction has been about observing the latest or up and coming inventions and discoveries and then writing stories that imagine where those discoveries and inventions may lead the world ten, 100 or even 1000 years down the line (see the aforementioned Asimov and his contemporaries). I think this is also a really good place for newer science fiction writers to start, because often stories that start here are more grounded in reality and thus their stories are more relatable to their audience.
Ground Your Piece
Piggybacking off of the last piece of advice, it’s important to make sure your pieces have some basis in things that are widely familiar, at least in terms of the audience you have in mind. Yeah, sure you can have people flying around in “dremelthopters” and eating “blortthas” wearing “gampfs” and so on, but if your story consists of too many of those things, it becomes too alien and strange for your audience and this often leads to confusion. No one reads a story purely to be confused, even mysteries function largely off of suspense, not true confusion. And ultimately just a bit too much confusion for your reader is quickly followed by them putting a story down and never coming back to it. Making sure your audience can keep up is of the utmost importance, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to make sure you introduce your more novel story elements gradually and sparingly.
Use Sci-fi Elements Purposefully
We’re on a roll here, so let’s take a cue from the previous point once more. Really ask yourself why you’ve included a science fiction element in your story. What purpose does it serve? If you’ve got giant mecha robots in your story, great, but what do they contribute to the overall narrative? If you’re including aliens because you want to use the interactions between them and humans as a metaphor for racism … well, then I’d assume you’ve watched a lot of Star Trek, and if you haven’t you should probably check it out. But I’d also say that thoughtfully used elements like that are a good step towards making your writing effective and engaging. Now, that isn’t to say that giant mecha robots can’t be used effectively, but maybe you just included them because they’re cool. That’s fine, but that decision and the weight of it (or lack thereof) will inevitably be felt by your audience, and that’s something that could harm your story’s overall impact depending on how it gets used. It’s also possible that your story is fine in spite of it or even the better for it; however, being conscious of that consideration in the first place is important. Try and make these decisions as purposefully as possible.
Don’t Let Originality Drive You
There’s a common trap I often see newer writers fall into: the fear of being unoriginal. It often also manifests itself instead as the intense desire to be truly original, to find that perfect storm of ideas that no one has ever come up with before. This is a snipe hunt, essentially. There will always be that person who can immediately point out how this element in a story exists in some other more popular piece of media or how that character is just like a character in something else they watched. Sometimes we’re that person, but you know what, you don’t have to worry about that person. Don’t be afraid of them and their observations. Just write your story and focus on making it good. That is far more important. Stories have been repeated over and over since before we had paper to write on, so long as you’re not copying and pasting Star Wars’ plot and reskinning everything with fantasy tropes, then you have nothing to worry about.
Contributed by: Lyle Davis, Writing Center Tutor
Photo by John Fowler on Unsplash
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