How to Write Science Fiction

How to write science fiction? Well, here are a few tips. To start with, you don’t get there by watching science fiction movies or television or video games. If you want to write science fiction, you need to read science fiction. And not just science fiction:

Reading literary fiction will strengthen your diction,

Read histories and mysteries,

Biographies and classics,

Everything you read,

Will strengthen your mastery.

Okay, so it’s not the greatest poem, but you get the idea. Reading is the best training ground.

Next, if you are really going to be writing science fiction, you should have a better than passing acquaintance with science. You don’t necessarily have to have a science degree, but you need to have paid attention in school and maybe done some self-learning. For example, if you want to write a space opera then you should have an understanding of things like gravity and inertia, Newton’s laws, relativity, and how they might affect a ship or other bodies travelling through space. You are just going to look silly if you have a rocket doing things that no rocket could possibly do. And you will be called out on it.

Do your research. If you are writing a time travel story and your characters are going back in time, you need to research the time period and setting that they are going to. Watching Les Misérables does not make you an expert on the French Revolution. Read up on it.

Don’t try to copy other writers. The style of some of your favorite authors may rub off on you, but don’t consciously try to mimic them. Tell your own story in your own voice as best you can.

“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,

And every single one of them is right!”

This is better poetry, but that’s because it is Kipling and not me. What it means is, there are many valid ways to tell a story. There are certainly wrong ways to tell a story, but there is not a definitive right way. You have a multitude of options.

Science fiction is speculative. It is heavily reliant on imagination. Not only do you need to write compelling characters, but you have to put them in speculative situations. That is, situations outside the norm. It doesn’t have to be completely off the wall. The more grounded in reality you can make it, the better. But you have to exercise your imagination muscle.

Above all (as with any writing) tell the story that you want to tell. Don’t try to please someone else. Don’t try to write what you think the market wants to see. Please yourself first. After all, if you aren’t excited by it, what are the chances that anyone else will be?

Star liner

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