Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction

Given the many different ways of coming up with a story title – using a character’s name, using a line from the text or drawing from a conceptual object in the story, to name a few – just about any word or phrase would seem to serve as an adequate appellation.

Not so. In fact, you want to avoid writing an “adequate” title. You want something that stands out, something that grabs your readers, something that makes them wonder what the story is about and proceed to page one. While every reader has different tastes, some titles seem to appeal to the common elements of science fiction readers’ psyches and stand out: “I, Robot”, “The Stars My Destination”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Fahrenheit 451”, “Lord of the Flies”, “Ringworld”.

To avoid creating an adequate (or even a god-awful) title, don’t use titles that are:

n Unpronounceable - Science fiction readers like to talk to one another about what they’ve read. But it’s difficult to talk about something that they can’t pronounce. Even worse, they might want to ask a book store clerk if that title is in stock.

n Embarrassing to say – Ditto.

n Difficult for others to spell -...

Tags: gobbet title, style, titles

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Sometimes authors start with the title and build the story around it. This is called a reverse gobbet (you may recall that a gobbet is a title taken from a story’s text). James Tiptree Jr.’s novel “Brightness Falls from the Air” is an example of a reverse gobbet, with the title originally appearing as a phrase in a poem by Elizabethan Thomas Nashe (well, sort of – it’s a misread line). The reverse gobbet may seem like an odd way to write a story, but sometimes a single evocative phrase can rouse the muse.

Tags: getting motivated to write, gobbet title, reversed gobbets, style, titles

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Selecting a title marks one of the most important decisions you’ll make about your story. The title blares across a novel’s cover and is listed in a magazine’s table of contents. For science fiction readers, those few words hint at the story’s meme (or subgenre, such as alien invasion, space exploration, time travel); some readers prefer certain memes over others and will pass over a story (or give it a try) simply because of the meme your title suggests.

The great problem facing writers then is to come up with a catchy – and memorable – title. There are a number of approaches authors take in selecting titles. With examples from “Star Trek: The Original Series” episodes, you could name the story after:

n Characters - “Miri” is the name of an episode about a 300-year-old child survivor of a plague that wiped out all of her planet’s adults; she’s the story’s pivotal character who must mature if the Enterprise landing party is to successfully cure the disease and prevent their own deaths from it.

n Attributes of characters - “The Enemy Within” is about a transporter accident that splits Captain Kirk into two: one that is gentle and rational,...

Tags: gobbet title, style, titles

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Avoid starting a paragraph - and especially a story - with “It”. As a pronoun, “it” is shorthand for another word that preceded it, such as: “The phone rang. It woke up the baby.” You know that “it” is the phone ringing. If the opening sentence starts with “it”, however, the reader doesn’t know what “it” is.

Tags: opening sentence, pronouns, style

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One of the quickest ways to ruin a story’s texture is to repeat the same word between sentences and paragraphs. For example:

Koorana quivered as Birray’s scent grew stronger than ever before, so strong that the teenager thought it entwined with her very blood. For a teenage male with such wide shoulders he possessed the sweetest smile, she mused, and so tall, too. He motioned to look up, and Koorana realized everyone else in the tent was standing. She broke her stare, quickly stood. Averting her eyes to the dirt ground beneath them, Koorana vowed to concentrate on the service, but a moment later she allowed herself one last look at Birray. He was still staring at her and winked. The teenager turned back, happy, and even in the dim light could see the flowers adorning the altar.

Notice how some words, particularly “teenager” and its variant “teenage” are repeated? The paragraph could be improved by eliminating two of the three uses of that word, perhaps by replacing the first “teenager” with a synonym such as “adolescent” and simply using the pronoun “she” for “The teenager” in the last sentence.

Flaubert recommended never using a word more than once on...

Tags: invisible word, repetition, rhetorical effect, style, texture

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Have you ever wondered why some television characters always wear the same clothes? Gilligan of “Gilligan’s Island” always dons his red shirt and white cap while Fred Flintstone always wears a spotted leopard’s wool. Such characters appear less real because in the everyday world, people wear different clothes from day to day.

Likewise, you don’t want your characters to always refer back to one another with the exact same word throughout your story, particularly in a novel. Such a word is called a “referent”.

In the real world, different people refer to us in different ways. Suppose your name is Amanda Philips. Your co-workers might call you “Amanda”, your close friends “Mandy”, your significant other “Snookums”, your professional contacts “Ms. Phillips”, your kid sister “Manda”, etc.

Consider how “Star Trek: The Original Series” handled referents for its characters, particularly Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott. Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy refer to him as “Scotty”. Mr. Spock calls him “Mr. Scott.” Others call him “Engineer Scott.” This is a realistic way of handling referents.

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.
(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: characters, dialogue, referents, style

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Sometimes the only purpose of a story’s sentence is to say that nothing happened. Such sentences are called “nulls”. An example would be the sentence “He said nothing.” Fortunately, nulls are easy to spot: if your story were occurring in real life, nulls would be the points where nothing happens. Nulls can be deleted from the story. They slow down the piece’s immediacy and dramatic tension.

Tags: dialogue, dramatic tension, nulls, style

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Tight writing is using the minimum number of words necessary to convey an idea or to describe an event. Writing tightly allows your text to be punchier and for the plot to move more quickly. At the very least, tight writing reduces your word count, allowing you to spend more words on text that truly advances your story’s or builds dramatic tension.

Here’s a list of common expressions , which I’ve run into during my years of editing, that should be tightened.

“a blonde girl”

Just write “blonde”; a male with light-colored hair is “blond” (no “e”)

“knelt down”

Just write “knelt”; the act of kneeling implies one is going downward

“nods his head up and down”

Just write “nods”; this gesture alone indicates the head is moving up and down

“nods yes” or “nods to the affirmative”

Just write “nods”; this gesture alone means “yes” or indicates agreement

“shakes his head no” or “shakes his head to the negative”

Just write “shakes his head”; this gesture alone means “no” or indicates disagreement

“stood up”

Just write “stood”; the act of standing implies one is rising

“the two of us”

Just write “we”

“they both”; “we both”

Just write “we”...

Tags: style, tight writing

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Converting passive to active voice is a simple process. First, identify the sentence’s subject, or who/what the sentence is doing something. For example, in the passive sentence “Through him was running an icy shiver.” “Shiver” is the subject.

Next, place the subject at the sentence’s beginning. You would then have a sentence that reads “An icy shiver through him was running.”

Tags: active voice, being verbs, passive voice, style, verb tense

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Tags: active voice, being verbs, passive voice, style, verb tense

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So you’ve written a scene jam packed with action, ripe with conflict and filled with tension – but every time you read it, the writing feels flat. The problem may be that you’re writing in passive rather than active voice.

Active voice is when the subject of the sentence does (or acts upon) something. In the following active voice sentence, the subject (streak of light), does something (arcs):

The streak of light arced across the sky as if a falling star.

Passive voice, however, occurs when the subject is acted upon. For example, the above sentence in passive voice would be written as:

Arcing across the sky was a streak of light, as if a falling star.

Passive voice generally should be avoided, for a couple of reasons:

n It’s dull - It’s like telling you something “exists”. In the above the example, the author really is saying “In the sky exists a streak of light.” Sleeker and more economical, active voice speeds up the story.

n It’s awkward - Notice how the phrase “as if a falling star” seems stuck to the end of the sentence, as if it is out of place. Rewriting the sentence so it’s...

Tags: active voice, being verbs, passive voice, style, verb tense

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Sometimes the real pleasure of writing – and reading - isn’t about a well-crafted tale with a fast-moving plot involving intriguing characters set in a well-described landscape. After all, penning such a story entails a lot of sweat, and for readers, they expect nothing less than a well-developed piece. Instead, the real smile comes when the author leaves a special treats for the reader, such as hiding some surprise not germane to the story. These surprises are called “easter eggs”, a term science fiction writing workshops have borrowed from the jargon of computer programming.

For example, an author might encode, with the first letters of consecutive sentences, some message to the reader. In other instances, the author may use obscure allusions, such as what James Lecky does in his recently published “The Season Without Sun”. In the Lecky’s story, the antagonists are a people called the “Dajzyn” - the Tuva word for “enemy.” Tuva is a Russian republic on the central steppes of Asia, which one theory posits is where homo sapiens came from when moving into Ice Age Europe, the apparent setting of this story.

The pleasure for the author is akin to being part of an inside joke....

Tags: allusion, cookies, style, symbolism, tuckering

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Tags: editing, proofreading, style, usage

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There are a lot of great writers out there but only so many novels and short stories that book companies can publish. To prevent your piece from having a competitive disadvantage, you’ll want to ensure it is as publishable as possible when the editor picks it up. That includes enduring your piece follows all of those punctuation and capitalization rules that back in grammar school that led us to many a daydream about being on an exotic alien world or hunting dinosaurs in the Jurassic.

Not following these rules instantly makes your story more difficult to read. And despite a great plot line and descriptions, your editor will be thinking of how much time he’s going to have to spend correcting your work – time he doesn’t really have. When there’s another piece in a pile of submissions that probably is as good as yours, he’s likely to set aside your story in favor of one that won’t overburden him.

During my editing experience, I’ve seen the same set of capitalization and punctuation errors repeated in many pieces. Here’s a list of them.

Tags: commas, end marks, punctuation, semicolons, style

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When writing any story, your goal ought to be to create and maintain a fictional dream, or an “illusion that there is no filter between reader and events that the reader is actually experiencing what he is reading,” as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. defines it.

For the reader, one of the joys of literature is to be immersed in the fictional dream. As a writer, there may be no greater disservice to your reader than to break this illusion. As science fiction author and editor Stanley Schmidt once wrote, “Your job as a writer is to make your reader forget that he or she is reading …”

The stronger the fictional dream, the more immediate the story and its characters are to the reader. The payoff for the author is that his story’s message will stick longer with the reader – never mind that the author’s stature (and sales) correspondingly will rise.

Tags: fictional dream, getting started, plot, show vs. tell, style

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Tags: cliches, style

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A common mistake among novice writers is shifting within their story so that events are occurring in the now but then in the next paragraph are happening in the past. This is a sign that the writer is changing verb tenses.

There are two common verb tenses in which you could write. Most typically used is “past tense”. In this case, the story’s events are told as if they’ve happened in the past (never mind that your story may be set in the future – the reader actually is hearing about the events from a future beyond which the story is told):

Col. Noel turned away from the reflection of his wrinkled face in the starcraft’s portal. Nothing to see but dust and gas anyway, he muttered to himself. His baggy eyes glanced at the gamma ray radiation sensors; soon the ship would enter the glowing cloud’s open center, where immortality awaited him. He moved toward the helm but cringed as the arthritis in his knee spiked. There was nanomedicine for the infirmity, but taking the capsules only reminded him of his body’s inevitable slow destruction. He sighed, resorted to giving the computer a voice command to slow speed, noticed a...

Tags: past tense, present tense, style

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Perhaps the most common mistake among novice writers is that tell rather show.

To “tell” what happens is to state it directly, as might occur in a newspaper article. For example:

Lambert was excited to see another boot print.

To “show” what happens, however, is to present the events without being told directly how one feels or reacts. The above example of “telling” could be rewritten to show Lambert’s excitement:

“There’s another one!” Lambert said, pointing at the boot print.

Tags: description, dramatic tension, passive voice, style

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As developing your story, maintaining a sense of tension is vital. Without dramatic tension – a feeling of uncertainty in the reader about how the main character will solve (or even if he will resolve) the central problem – the story will be flat and vanilla.

Creating tension involves controlling the story’s pace. Pace is the timing by which the major events in the plot unfold and in which the big scenes are shown.

The “better” the story, then the better that the author handled the pace. “Star Wars IV: A New Hope”, the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “Yesterday's Enterprise”, Douglas Adams’ comedic novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” all are examples of masterful pacing.

Every story has a different pace. Those that are more introspective tend to move at a slower pace while those that are action-packed tend to be fast. Because of this, all stories run on a “story clock”. This is a measurement in which action is internally described. As with the wider universe, however, there is no objective clock. A true sign of craftsmanship is when an author sets the story clock winding at...

Tags: dramatic tension, main character, plot, setting, style

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Any story you tell by definition has a plot, characters, setting point of view and theme. But to really make a story pop, an author has to interweave and play these elements against one another so that the story has tension.

Tension is the force behind the need to find resolution. It stems from the hook that caught the reader in the opening lines: there’s an interesting central problem to solve. The rest of the story needs to focus on solving that problem.

But the author shouldn’t make the outcome – the resolution of the problem – obvious to the reader. The author should always leave open the possibility that the problem won’t be resolved. Of course, most readers know (or at least expect) that the problem will be resolved. By creating doubt, the writer causes the reader to wonder how the problem will be resolved. The greater this tension, the more likely the reader will stick with you through the story.

Generally, the best way to create doubt is to make the problem increasingly more difficult to resolve as the story continues.

Tags: central problem, narrative hook, opening lines, plot, style

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What is a story? An idea or a setting or a character alone do not make a story. A fictional story is all of those and more.

For the convenience of analysis and discussion, stories often are broken into parts. These parts typically are referred to as the five elements of fiction. They include:

n Plot - How the problem in the story is overcome, typically thought of as physical action

n Setting -Where and when this action occurs

n Character - Whoever attempts to solve the story’s problem as well as those who create the problem and those that appear incidentally

n Point of view -Perspective from which the story is narrated

n Theme - Purpose for which a story is told

It’s easy to think of the five elements of fiction as a matter of the 5 W’s and 1 H, or what, where, when who, why and how. Plot is what happens in the story. Setting is where and when the story happens. Character is who the story happens to. Point of view is how the story happens to be told. Theme is why the story happened to be told, or its message.

Each of...

Tags: character, plot, point of view, setting, style, theme

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A sign of true craftsmanship for a writer is when he selects the right words and arranges them in an evocative way. After all, the most interesting character facing a significant moral decision in a fast-paced plot and exotic setting will sound flat if the words used are wrong. The vocabulary choices and ways they are arranged to create a sense of style is known as diction.

Consider this excellent use of diction from Frederic Brown’s short story “Puppet Show”:

Horror came to Cherrybell mounted on a burro led by an ancient, dirty and gray-bearded desert rat of a prospector who later gave the name of Dade Grant. Horror’s name was Garvane. He was approximately nine feet tall but so thin, almost a stickman, that he could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. Old Dade’s burro carried him easily, despite the fact that his feet dragged in the sand on either side. Being dragged through the sand for, as it later turned out, well over five miles hadn’t caused the slightest wear on the shoes – more like buskins, they were – which constituted all that he wore except for a pair of what could have been swimming trunks,...

Tags: description, style, word choice

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The kernel of any good science fiction story is a scientific fact that we know of today. A good writer grows his story by extrapolating from this fact. In the process, he probably should create an intriguing world that awes the reader in some way.

Consider H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.” In the 1890s when he wrote the piece, many scientists believed Mars was capable of supporting life. They also believed (incorrectly we now know) that the father a planet was from the Sun, then the older it was. From this, Wells made an extrapolation: What if there really were Martians living on a dying world? What if they had to take drastic measures to ensure their survival? What if, because of Mars’ lower gravity and older age, the Martians had evolved differently than humans?

He answers all of those “what if” questions with his novel that pits invading Martians against Victorian England and the inhabitants of Earth. In doing so, he creates a sense of wonder by using real science – at least real science for his time.

That scientific extrapolation can create a sense of wonder or awe is a philosophical attitude in the science fiction...

Tags: dramatic tension, science, style, tone. diction

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Ever read story before bed and find it so gripping that you stay up far later than you should just to find out what is going to happen? If so, you’ve been a “victim” of narrative drive.

Narrative drive is the force that makes a reader feel that something is about to happen. The more powerful your narrative drive, the less likely the reader is to put down the story.

All of the great works of science fiction have powerful narrative drives.

But creating a powerful narrative drive involves a lot more than creating interesting worlds as does Frank Herbert in “Dune”, intriguing characters as does Orson Scott Card in “Ender’s Game” or a fascinating premise as does Isaac Asimov in “Foundation”. It is all of these things more: good plotting, mesmerizing settings, captivating characters, proper point of view selection, an absorbing theme and an artists’ handling of stylistic issues. So, while we can discuss elements of a story in isolation, as occurs on this Web site, always remember that a good story is the sum of these elements.

To obtain narrative drive, then requires a full sense of a story’s various elements. Still, there are a couple of things...

Tags: action, description, style

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Every author writes in a certain "style." Style is the choice of vocabulary and phrasing to create an effect that runs through the entire story.

Consider this snippet from Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Awakening":

Marlan was bored with the ultimate bordeom that only Utopia can supply. He stood before the great window and stared down at the scuddling clouds, driven by the the gale that was racing past the foothills of the city. Sometimes, through a rent in the billowing white blanket, he could catch a glimpse of lakes and forests and the winding ribbon of the river that flowed through the empty land he now so seldom troubled to visit.

Now compare it it to this sample from Joe Haldeman's "Angel of Light":

It began innocently enough. Christmastime and no money. I went down into the cellar and searched deeply for something to give the children. Something they wouldn't have already found during their hajjes down there.

Both pieces make use of different stylistic techniques to creat a certain impression. Clark uses full sentences describing a panoramic scene and repeats words to give a sense of the sweeping ennui facing not only his main character but all...

Tags: phrasing, style, vocabulary

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