[This is Part 2! Read Part 1 here.]
Gentlefolk and scoundrels, the question before us today is, “How do I get started writing science fiction and fantasy?”
Part 2 of this guide picks up where Part 1 left off. In Part 1, I covered some steps that are more generally about writing fiction. This time, we’ll focus on writing SFF specifically. AND it turns out there’s so much more to say that I’m going to split this up and tackle Part 3 next week. Whew!
As I mentioned last time, SFF is a vast space with infinite variation, and all kinds of stories and styles. I won’t get into the many subgenres here, because that could be a blog post on its own, but whatever kind of speculative writing you want to do, in my opinion, belongs in SFF. In my view, SFF is incredibly inclusive.
Therefore no advice about writing SFF can possibly cover every kind of SFF writing that you might want to try. And any “rules” that exist for SFF subgenres don’t apply to many other subgenres. That said, there’s one thing that all Speculative Fiction (SFF) shares that sets it apart from a lot of other literature, and that is the speculative element! So a lot of this guide will be about how to think about your approach to the speculative element in your fiction. (And that approach can be different in every story, too!)
Table of Contents
For easier navigation!
- What is the Speculative Element?
- Understanding Reader Expectations — or, Genre Conversations
- Introducing the Speculative Element.
- Cognitive Load.
What is the Speculative Element?
If you’re just starting to write an SFF story, it might be a good idea to think about what you consider speculative about it. Or in other words, how does the story’s reality differ from the reality you live in?
In some cases this might be a pretty simple answer. You could be writing about life on a spaceship one hundred years from now. Or maybe the world of your story is example like your lived world but there are werewolves. Or your story world is haunted by ghosts. Or maybe you’re writing a story set in an alternate history where Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo and conquered England.
Other times this might be trickier. Maybe in your reality spirits are real and they communicate with humans. Is that speculative, or is it your lived experience? For example, the way I grew up, we prayed to the spirits of our ancestors every morning and every evening and left food for them. What isn’t “real” about that?
That said, I have to admit none of the ancestors every talked back. So maybe my speculative element would be that my grandmother talks back to me one time when I’m praying in front of her photograph.
Horror is a little bit different than Fantasy and Sci-fi because horror doesn’t necessarily need a speculative element. The horror, the dread, or the terror can be generated by elements that exist in the writer’s physical reality. Horror, in my opinion, focuses on the reactions to the elements, whether they are speculative or “real,” that provoke these emotions. But we still count horror as part of SFF.
It can be useful, I’ve found, to keep a list of speculative elements you’d like to explore. I sometimes frame them as “what if” questions. What if the ghost of my grandmother spoke to me? What would she want from me? How would I react? What problem would I face if this happened? Who else might I talk to about it? And so on.
I’ve heard some writers say that if you can drop the speculative element without changing the story, then you don’t really have a strong enough speculative element, but I personally don’t believe this to be strictly true. I think you can use speculative elements as mood and setting. You could write a story on a spaceship that could work equally well on an ocean liner with very little adaptation, and I think that’s fine, actually! However, you want to develop a little awareness of reader expectations (which I’ll get into in the next section.)
How integral the speculative element is to the story is a mark of genre, usually. Speculative fiction that drifts towards literary fiction can have a very light engagement with the speculative elements, while so-called “hard sci-fi” (a term I personally dislike) tends to be much more focused on the speculative elements, and such elements are often central to the plot. Some fantasy stories are very wrapped up in a fantastical element, like magic, while others only glancingly deal with it.
But we’ll get into that. For now, just consider, what’s different about your story world compared to your lived world? What are ways that could play into the story? What are the characters’ reactions to the speculative elements?
The speculative element in a story is sometimes more like a thought experiment that allows the story to explore an extensive what if scenario. For example, what if humans lived on Mars (as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s series, Mars Trilogy)? These kinds of stories might have levels of extrapolation that consider various developments of the speculative element, from the obvious and intended to the unintended, the accidental, the side effect. They might explore how people are harmed by the speculative element or how they seek to leverage it for personal gain.
Other times, the speculative element works in the story as a metaphor, for example the vampire as seductive foreigner and outsider (as in Bran Stoker’s Dracula), making literal the danger of the “exotic” Other when Count Dracula comes to London and brings his vampire plague with him.
While I think it’s better, for me at least, to write the first draft without thinking too much about what the speculative element in your story does for the text, it’s often helpful after you’ve written a chunk of it to ask yourself, what is the function of the fantastical in my story? Is it a thought experiment I can explore, or is it a metaphor that helps the reader feel something I want them to feel?
Understanding Reader Expectations – or, Genre Conversations.
Speaking of metaphor, something that SFF writers have to be careful about (and this has to do with reader expectations) is, establishing whether you’re writing about something literally or metaphorically, especially at the beginning of the story when your reader is still getting situated in your story. If I write something like “The trees reached their leafless branches up towards the bare winter sky” as my first sentence, I’ve created a little instability for the SFF reader with the word “reached.” Is it a metaphor? Or is this a world where trees can literally stretch and reach their branches, like Ents? Be careful of this, to avoid confusing the reader on a point where you didn’t intend confusion. (Deliberate confusion is a whole other thing!)
And this is where genre comes into play. In a literary novel, that word “reached” would most likely be read first as a metaphor, not literal. But in the world of SFF, your readers are looking for and expecting a speculative element.
So, how do you think about genre? The most useful way I’ve found is this framing: genre is a conversation. When you encounter a story, what other stories is it in conversation with? What tropes does it play with? What other stories does it seem to reference, either to be inspired by or to subvert or to argue with? This conversation framing also provides the flexibility for seeing genre as fluid, not necessarily constrained to a single mode.
Readers as people who are invited into the conversation, and they will have some expectations about what the conversation will be about. Some readers will be new to conversation and have Mystery readers expect that the mystery will be solved by the end of the story. Horror readers want to feel dread, or terror, or horror, or all three. Romance readers expect the lovers to find love by the end of the story. And so on.
So what do SFF readers expect? This is where a little bit of genre understanding can help, especially for longer works, like novels and novellas. Short stories, in my experience, can be very flexible because there are so many markets for different kinds of stories, and also because the length of short stories means that readers can dip into something they don’t typically read, or something that’s more experimental or challenging, in a way they wouldn’t be as eager to do for the length of an entire novel. A novel is an investment!
The best way to start understanding reader expectations is to read a lot of SFF stories and ask yourself questions about what you read. After reading the first page of a novel, ask yourself, what are my expectations about this story and this world now? How did the writer establish those?
Introducing the Speculative Element; or, Let your Reader Build, not Demolish
Typically, you want to introduce the speculative element right away in genre SFF fiction. This is for two reasons, in my experience: one is the aforementioned reader expectations. Your SFF fan came to your novel or short story for werewolves, and it’s nice to include at least a hint of that promise early on.
The second reason is because of worldbuilding. You usually want to signal to the reader what kind of world your story is taking place in early on, both because the reader will feel excited to encounter the speculative elements, but also for efficiency. The more you can establish some norms about your world early on, the less time you need to spend dismantling reader assumptions, if that makes sense.
Let me explain. Say you’re writing a story about a coven of witches who are trying to summon a spirit of a long dead sorceress. You’ve set this story at a women’s college in the Northeast of the United States, in the year 1878.
Let’s say your first scene is a wonderful conversation between two friends as they walk between buildings during classes. Unless you deliberately include details that signal the time period of your story–details like dress, or maybe habits of speech that feel more old-fashioned–your contemporary readers are going to first assume a contemporary setting. With that assumption, if you mention that one of the characters gets a message over the wireless, most readers will be confused and it will take more time to undo their assumptions and rebuild what you want them to think of as the setting.
Then, let’s say there’s no mention of magic until chapter five, when the two friends meet the rest of their coven to do some magic. Now the reader has to readjust their expectations again to include the idea that there’s magic. Some readers will be further confused about this, since the magic could contradict some of what they’ve already assumed about the world.
In my opinion, a strong beginning to both a novel and a short story will contain enough seeds of your speculative elements and other important world information so that the reader can continue to build on their assumptions instead having to question, dismantle, and then rebuild anew.
What if you’re writing horror, where the source of the horror is something that you want to reveal later? In that case, I’ve seen a lot of stories that establish the mood and tone of the story in the first paragraph, even the first line. You don’t have to reveal the horror, but you want to, again, let the reader know through little details and your language that they’re in for a delicious horror story. Even if you’re writing a scene that’s warm and comforting, as a way to contrast the horror that’s going to happen, find ways to include a small unsettling detail that will plant a seed in the reader’s heart, getting them ready for the horror to come.
I can’t remember which writer I heard this from, but someone once said that the very first line of the story should aim for the end. I think that’s a great way to think about handling speculative elements, too.
But that doesn’t mean you need to open with a bunch of explanation, or a history lesson, or anything like that (unless you want to and you can do it artfully!) Rather, try to think about a detail or two in the first line or paragraph that can convey just enough of the world that will let your reader build the world as you give them the bricks. It can be as simple as a word. And don’t be afraid to using “telling”! “Telling” can be crafted into a compelling opening.
Some examples of great openings:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
In a wooden house on a modest farmstead by a dense wood near a roving river to the west of town, miles from the wide road and far away from the peculiar madness that is men at war, lived the Missus, the Missus’s grown daughters Adelaide and Catherine, the Missus’s sister Bitsy, the Missus’s poorly mother Anna, and the Missus’s fifteen-year-old slave girl Sully, who had a heart made of teeth—for as soon as she heard word that Albert, the Missus’s husband, had been slain in battle, she took up arms against the family who’d raised her, slipping a tincture of valerian root and skullcap into their cups of warmed milk before slitting their throats in the night.
Rivers Solomon, “Blood is Another Word for Hunger”
This example is interesting because it uses a metaphor – “heart made of teeth” — but immediately explains it so the reader isn’t confused whether it’s meant to be taken literally. The writer demonstrates their confidence there.
Cognitive Load.
“Cognitive load” is my term for what you’re expecting your reader to hold in their heads as they read your work. It’s something that all texts ask of readers, but there’s a difference of degree. Compare the following two opening sentences:
“The boy who will become court magician this time is not a cruel child.”
Sarah Pinsker
The Court Magician, by Sarah Pinsker.
It’s a simple sentence, but it carries weight. We know the setting has a court, indicating a monarchy; we know that court has a magician, which suggests there is magic in the world. Notice also the play of time. We’re in the present tense (“the boy…is not cruel”) but there’s also a flash forward to the future, when the boy will become the court magician. The phrase “this time” also implies this is an event that has happened before. In other words, it implies there have been a string of court magicians, and further implies they are discovered or perhaps trained since they were children.
And then there’s the assertion–he’s not a cruel child–that inevitably makes us wonder, “But….? Why are you insisting he’s not cruel? There’s something there, something to pay attention to.”
So already we have some worldbuilding and we suspect the story is going to engage with this question of, is the boy cruel, or not?
Like I said, a lot packed into fourteen words! But none of it feels overwhelming. Either the information is subtly presented so we almost don’t notice it, or it’s information that we can slot into a genre fairly easily, like the idea of a court magician in fantasy stories.
Here’s another opening sentence that I made up for the same story:
“The boy Alphonse, the future court magician for the Regent of Olaria, learned his trade from Great Gretta.”
Jane, making it up.
We have the boy and the court and the magician as before, but we also have a bunch of names – Alphonse, the Regent, Olaria, and Great Gretta. That’s a lot of proper nouns for a reader to keep in their head, and they don’t know yet which are important for the story. That’s what I mean by cognitive load–how many new elements, including proper names, are you asking the reader to pay attention to? Lots of speculative fiction also uses neologisms–made-up words to describe things that we don’t have in our physical reality–and those also take up load in the reader’s head. Also, a lot of the information occupies the same space–they are names of people and places. In the earlier (and much better!) example, we had information that subtly suggested things about the way court magicians were selected. And no names at all.
Critically missing in the bad second example is what I consider the hook of the first sentence–the assertion that the boy is not cruel. For this and other reasons, the cognitive load for the reader is a lot while at the same time the sentence just feels… flat. Passive. Like it’s landed on the page with a thud and isn’t going anywhere. To me, the first example feels like a sentence that’s about to take flight.
That’s Enough for Now
This blog post is already too long so I’ll stop there. Next week, I’ll wrap this up. (I hope!)