How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy Quotes

“Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can't possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“The truth is that good fantasies carefully limit the magic that's possible. In fact, the magic has to be defined, at least in the author's mind, as a whole new set of natural laws that cannot be violated during the course of the story. That is, if at the beginning of the story you have established that your hero can make only three wishes, you better not have him come up with a fourth wish to save his neck right at the end. That's cheating, and your reader will be quite correct to throw your book across the room and carefully avoid anything you ever write in the future. All speculative fiction stories have to create a strange world and introduce the reader to it - but good fantasy must also establish a whole new set of natural laws, explain them right up front, and then faithfully abide by them throughout.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“...You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honour when they applaud the tale you tell.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Who hurts the most? In the world you have invented, who suffers the most? Chances are that it is among the characters who are in pain that you will find your main character, partly because your readers' sympathy will be drawn toward a suffering character and partly because a character in pain is a character who wants things to change. He's likely to act. Of course, a character who suffers a lot and then dies won't be a productive main character unless your story is about life after death. But your eye should be drawn toward pain. Stories about contented people are miserably dull.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“I firmly believe that a good storyteller's education never ends, because to tell stories perfectly you have to know everything about everything. Naturally, none of us actually achieve such complete knowledge - but we should live as if we were trying to do so. You can't afford to close off any area of inquiry.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“I believe, when it comes to storytelling ... that mistakes are often the beginning of the best ideas. After all, a mistake wasn't planned. It can't be a cliché. All you have to do is think of a reason why the mistake isn't a mistake at all, and you might have something fresh and wonderful, something to stimulate a story you never thought of quite that way before.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“The novelty and freshness you'll bring to the field won't come from the new ideas you think up. Truly new ideas are rare, and usually turn out to be variations on old themes anyway. No, your freshness will come from the way you think, from the person you are; it will inevitably show up in your writing, provided you don't mask it with heavy-handed formulas or clichés.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“What we've done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Rigorous extrapolation, a gosh-wow love of gadgets, and mystical adventures in strange and mysterious places; every major stream in speculative fiction today can be traced back to authors who were writing before the publishing categories existed. From among the readers in the twenties and thirties who loved any or all of these authors arose the first generation of "science fiction writers", who knew themselves to be continuing in a trail that had been blazed by giants.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“If a tale we're reading or watching on screen is too familiar, it becomes boring; we know the end from the beginning and switch off the set or set the book aside. Yet if it is too unfamiliar, we reject the story as unbelievable or incomprehensible. We demand some strangeness, but not too much.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Or in other words, science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

“Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn't know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

“Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to known reality.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

“The story is nothing like what you first thought it would be. But so what? It's better - richer, deeper, truer - than the original idea. The idea did its work: it got you thinking. After that, if you feel bound to stick to it no matter what, that idea becomes a ball and chain that you drag with you through the whole process.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Yet in your stories, you must imagine all these things, not just because it will make the world of your story more complete, but also because the very completeness of the world will transform your story and make it far more truthful. As your characters move through a more complex world, they will have to respond with greater subtlety and flexibility; the constant surprises they run into will also surprise the reader - and you!”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“If you have people do some magic, impossible thing by stroking a talisman or praying to a tree, it's fantasy; if they do the same thing by pressing a button or climbing inside a machine, it's science fiction.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

“It wouldn't be practical to have sections called "Dog Stories", "Horse Stories", "Mid-life Crisis and Adultery", "Writers and Artists Struggling to Discover Themselves", "People in Past Eras Who Think and Talk Just Like Modern Americans", and "Reminiscences of Childhoods in Which Nothing Happened", even though these are all fairly popular themes for fiction.”
― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy