One way to write a Science Fiction novel, part two

In part one I tried to convince you that writing and publishing a science fiction novel is a lot easier than it was thirty years ago. In this installment I'm going to talk about the actual writing and how I learned to do it.

I remember back in High School when I found out that we would be reading The Martian Chronicles for English class. Not only had I already read it twice, I had checked it out of the high school library that very day intending to read it a third time.

It should have been an easy assignment for me, but it wasn't. I had become possessive about Ray Bradbury. I felt that he was writing for me and for people like me. I didn't think a mere High School English teacher could really understand Ray Bradbury. Shakespeare, sure. Dickens, OK. F. Scott Fitzgerald, maybe. (I had my doubts when I read The Diamond As Big As The Ritz).

But not Ray Bradbury.

The worst thing was one assignment where she asked us to write a Science Fiction story that fit into the world of The Martian Chronicles. I didn't know how to make up a story. Nobody ever tried to teach us that. She taught us about Tragic Flaws and other things, but nothing about what a story is and how to make one. I managed to crank something out but it was terrible and I knew it.

It would be years before I figured out how to make a story. One resource that was incredibly helpful was Trial and Error by Jack Woodford:

Trial and Error

If you look at the listing for this book you'll see that it helped more than one Science Fiction writer get started, even though it has nothing to say about Science Fiction specifically.

(Actually he did have something to say about Science Fiction in one of his books. Judging it by the covers of S.F. magazines, where young women were frequently at the mercy of bug eyed monsters, he thought the whole thing was a blind for sadism).

In any case, to make a story you need to have a protagonist with a problem, and the story is how he solves the problem or otherwise learns how to deal with it. The solution might be clever, but if you aren't writing a mystery story it doesn't need to be.

For Science Fiction the problem needs to be something that someone living in the present day could NOT have, or it must be caused by something that does not exist in the present day. If you don't follow this rule you have a "Bat Durston", which is a non S.F. story dressed up in S.F. trappings. In the old days authors sold the same stories to multiple genre magazines using this method. You can't get away with this now. Even Firefly, which could be accurately described as a Western in outer space, did more than that.

The second rule for making a Science Fiction story is that the story must be about something. When you figure out what your story is about, that tells you what must happen in the story, what characters are needed to tell it, what the main problem is, what leads up to it, and how it must be resolved.

An S.F. story can be about more than one thing, but it can't be about nothing. (Or more accurately, it can be about nothing, but it won't be any good).

A story might start with a notion. For example, Heinlein had a notion for Starship Troopers.

Starship Troopers

He wondered if there was a reasonable way to limit who could vote in U.S. elections. In real life many ways of limiting who could vote had been tried: male only, white only, 21 and over only, property owner only. He proposed that it might be limited to veterans. Not career soldiers, but people who had served but were not currently in the service. It's an interesting notion, and it keeps the novel from becoming just another space opera.

(What I find interesting is that most people think of Starship Troopers as a conservative novel, but if Heinlein's proposal was ever implemented very few of our current conservatives would be allowed to run for office).

The book is about something, not just spacemen fighting aliens with futuristic weapons.

Another example of something that is saved from being a mere space opera by being about something is Joe Haldeman's The Forever War:

The Forever War

In this case the concept was that soldiers fighting an interplanetary war might feel alienated upon coming home because time dilation would have caused hundreds of years to pass while they were away fighting.

So there you have it. Figure out what the book is about, and everything else will follow. In the next installment I'll describe how I made that work with Shree Krishna And The Singularity.