Rob Bignell's Blog, page 233

5 Writing Prompts for Science Fiction Writers

Science fiction stories typically arise from a novum, a scientifically plausible concept that is a ���reality��� in the tale. The novum might be an mechanical device like robot servants, artificial intelligence, or faster-than-light spacecraft; it also can be a hypothetical idea such as ���The Earth is a scientific experiment run by aliens to determine the meaning of life��� or ���The government outlaws books.��� The author then asks ���What if?��� exploring how the world with this novum is different than ours.

Among the problems of many novice science fiction writers is instead of introducing a new novum they rely on used furniture ��� that is, they borrow novums from popular SF series. After all, how many novels have you read that use starships exploring the galaxy for the Earth-based Federation? Barely changing names to appear as if you are not appropriating ��� a starcraft seeking M-class worlds for the Earth-centered Alliance ��� still doesn���t cut it as original or fully using the potential that science fiction offers to examine our culture or humanity.

To help SF writers, here are some novums of potential near-future inventions from which stories could be built:

Drinking water from jellyfish
What if coastal communities received drinking water from giant jellyfish bio-engineered to convert salt water to fresh water? With local water supplies limited but coastal cities��� growing populations, the life-giving liquid must be found somewhere.

Mind uploads to robotic bodies
What if the space industry required that any of its employees working in outer space upload their minds to robotic bodies, which are better able to handle the adverse physical conditions? Would the intelligent, conscious robots be truly ���human���? How would this change what ���being human��� means?

Modified space explorers
Given the limitations posed by the speed of light, what if future interstellar space explorers were modified humans whose bodies and brains have been adjusted to better deal with the rigors of long journeys to other stars? How would they cope with ���real��� humans upon encountering them?

Rewilding the Amazon rainforest
What if deforestation largely turns the Amazon rainforest into a desert by the end of this century ��� and more environmentally-minded generations that follow decide to rewild it? How would they achieve this?

3D printer city kits
What if after a natural disaster (such as when Hurricane Irma flooded Houston), large 3D printers were brought in to quickly replace destroyed homes, businesses and other structures? Designs for existing buildings could be digitally stored so that the 3D printer could give a duplicate of any lost home or business.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.



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5 Tips on How to Improve Your Writing Style

��� Improve story's pacing by deleting authorisms
��� Avoid clever-author syndrome in storytelling 
��� Use fragments for rhetorical effect 
��� Avoid card tricks in the dark when writing 
��� Improve writing by eliminating ambiguities 
��� BONUS: "One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple." ��� Jack Kerouac

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.



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5 Quotations about Writing as Observation

���Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that���s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.��� - Don DeLillo

���...a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.��� - Shirley Jackson

���...(the) Creative writer...observes the world like any common men. But his vision observes the world quite differently. He can perceive from life-experience what common man cannot see at all.��� - Aristotle

���It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.��� - Vita Sackville-West

���The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, so that a hundred years later when a stranger looks at it, it moves again...��� - William Faulkner

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.



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Writing Affirmation: I write to find strength

Life can be difficult, and all too often during those times we feel that there���s no way out or that no one is there for us. In the face of such troubles, we can find our energy waning, our desire to struggle onward weakening.

Fortunately for authors, though, one practice for restoring peace of mind is tried-and-true ��� writing.

Writing allows you to follow your heart. When taking pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, you are doing what excites your soul and what you believe in. In the past, you have had faith in that path leading you to happiness, and it will lead there again.

Writing allows you to learn. As developing your story, you may have to research historical periods, geographic locales, scientific ideas and more. Most importantly, you discover more about your thoughts and values, of who you are.

Writing allows you to grow. Every writing session allows you to hone your writing skills and to reflect upon the world and your heart. You leave each session improved.

Writing allows you to relax. As you sit in a quiet place, a warm cup of your favorite tea or coffee within reach, you can lose yourself in imagination; your writing is a daydream transcribed.

Writing allows you to plan. You organize your thoughts and dreams into an imagined world with internal consistency, bringing order through your creativity to the natural chaos that surrounds you.

Writing allows you to laugh. In an imagined world, you always can create humorous scenes for characters to joke with one another, offering you the medicine needed to heal or to remain healthy.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.



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4 Must-Knows for Your Author's Website

��� On website, text is king, design is queen
��� Web text demands different kind of writing style
��� Fresh, original website content is vital
��� How to improve your web text���s readability  

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.



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Ebooks: The Now of Publishing

I originally had titled this entry ���Ebooks: The Future of Publishing��� but after editing changed it to ���Ebooks: The Now of Publishing.��� My original title might have been accurate in 2010, but since then digital books have come to be a major portion of the book market. They are now the primary way a sizable number of people read books, whether it be a classroom text or the latest airport novel.

More than 1 out of 4 Americans in 2016 read an ebook, according to a Pew Research Center report. And while use of ereaders has declined during the past five years, the reading of ebooks on tablets and smartphones have tripled and doubled respectively during that time. Further, more than third of Americans aged 18-29 read an ebook in 2016; the age group is the largest demographic to do so. Arguably, the habit will remain ingrained as they read books during the next six or seven decades of their lives. Indeed, during 2015, Americans purchased at least 204 million ebooks, according to Nielsen Bookscan and PubTrack Digital. While this has been flat for about three years, it���s still a remarkable number; just obtaining a 0.00005 percent share of those sales would push a title to more than 10,200 ebooks sold and to the top of most Amazon.com bestsellers lists for several weeks. Simply put, ebooks are not just a passing fad.

In addition, while ebooks and paper books largely are interchangeable, that is shifting. The same interchangeability was true of television and radio programming when people began buying TV sets in the early 1950s. But ebooks aren���t paper books any more than television was radio; they���re two different mediums for relaying information and entertainment. Today, ebooks can play videos and audio while linking to vast amounts of additional information, a limitation of paper books. And, just as television altered radio (How many dramatic programs are broadcast on your favorite AM or FM station anymore?), so ebooks are altering and shaping the purpose and function of paper books. The latter increasingly is the realm of celebrities and authors who are big names in their genres. Paper won���t die for many years to come, but like radio vis-��-vis television, its days as the primary way people read stories and nonfiction will wane.

Authors ��� whether novelists or nonfiction writers ��� who want to sell their titles in the years ahead will need to do so on digital platforms. And though precisely how ebooks will evolve storytelling or the presentation of information remains to be fully seen, authors need to learn the basics of ebook formatting now to both cash in on this market and to be prepared to take advantage of it during the next decade.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.



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Getting each one right every time

When should we write each and every? All too often these words are confused, especially where agreement (ensuring the sentence���s subject and the pronoun referring to it are both singular or both plural) is concerned.

Each means an individual object or person. For example, Each quarterback throws the ball a little differently.

Every means a two or more objects or people treated as one entity. To wit, Every quarterback dreams of winning the Super Bowl.

Part of the confusion rests in the fact that the words can be used interchangeably in some instance; it���s all a matter of what you want to emphasize. Johnny received each gift on his Christmas list emphasizes the individual gifts while Johnny received every gift on his Christmas list emphasizes that all of them were given, but practicably speaking, what���s the difference?

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.



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5 Free Creative Writing Prompts: Science Fiction

Science fiction stories typically arise from a novum, a scientifically plausible concept that is a ���reality��� in the tale. The novum might be an mechanical device like robot servants, artificial intelligence, or faster-than-light spacecraft; it also can be a hypothetical idea such as ���The Earth is a scientific experiment run by aliens to determine the meaning of life��� or ���The government outlaws books.��� The author then asks ���What if?��� exploring how the world with this novum is different than ours.

Among the problems of many novice science fiction writers is instead of introducing a new novum they rely on used furniture ��� that is, they borrow novums from popular SF series. After all, how many novels have you read that use starships exploring the galaxy for the Earth-based Federation? Barely changing names to appear as if you are not appropriating ��� a starcraft seeking M-class worlds for the Earth-centered Alliance ��� still doesn���t cut it as original or fully using the potential that science fiction offers to examine our culture or humanity.

To help SF writers, here are some novums of potential near-future inventions from which stories could be built:

Binary power
What if two harmless beams of energy intersecting one another could become a source of power, a light source, or a point of sound? How will this change the way we live in our houses, run our businesses, and receive government services?

Pollination robots
What if we invented robotic insects to cross pollinate our crops and wild plants? With the population of bees and other pollinators crashing, we may have no choice.

Solar highways
What if solar panels were installed in highways (with glass surfaces hard enough to handle traffic) and then hooked to power lines alongside the road? In areas receiving a lot of sunlight with few shadows and no snow, this could provide enough energy to power whole states or even countries.

Spray-on skin
What if you could seal a cut simply by spraying on, from a can, an adhesive that looks like skin? What are the many applications of this ��� first-aid kits, first responders, military medics, etc.?

Tube transport
What if you could travel from New York to China in two hours or around the world in six hours? A tube transport system that travels at 6500 miles per hour could replace airplanes.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.



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6 Tips for Creating Interesting Characters

��� Don���t underserve a character in story 
��� Don���t let characters chew the furniture 
��� Avoid using Mary Sue character type in stories
��� Keep freeze-frame in story brief, relevant
��� Develop complex antagonist to maximize conflict
��� How to create an interesting villain for your story 
��� BONUS: ���You can���t blame a writer for what the characters say.��� ��� Truman Capote
��� DOUBLE BONUS: ���I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.��� - Stephen King  

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.



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5 Great Humorous Thoughts on Writing

���It���s a thousand pages, give or take a few/I���ll be writing more in a week or two.��� - The Beatles

���Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.��� - Ernest Hemingway

���Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.��� - Robert Benchley

���I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.��� - Horace

���I���m writing an unauthorized autobiography.��� - Steven Wright

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.



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