Read How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy Online

Authors: Orson Scott Card

Tags: #Language Arts & Disciplines, #Reference, #Writing Skills, #Composition & Creative Writing, #Science Fiction, #Creative Writing, #Authorship, #Fantasy Literature

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (5 page)

BOOK: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
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On the other hand, David Zindell’s brilliant science fiction novel
Neverness
ends up with almost as many gods and mythical, magical events as the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
combined. Yet because it begins with a science fiction feel, the reader assumes from the start that the laws of the known universe apply
with exceptions.
The book is correctly marketed as science fiction, and that’s how it’s received.

These are the boundaries of speculative fiction, and within that country, the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. There are high walls here and there, and high-voltage fences, and moats with alligators-but there’s always a way over or under or around the obstacle. You must be aware of the boundaries; you must tread carefully whenever you get near one; but you are not their prisoner.

Indeed, you might think of the genre boundaries not as obstacles, but rather as dikes and levees that hold out the river or the sea. Wherever they are raised up, they allow you to cultivate new land; and when you need a new space to plant your story, just put up a new dike where you want it

to be. If enough of us like your story, we’ll accept your new boundary as the true one, and plant a few stories of our own in your new-found land. It’s the best gift we can give each other. We’re all of us harvesting crops in lands opened up by the pioneers in our field-Wells, Verne, Merritt, Haggard, Lovecraft, Shelley, Tolken, and many others. But we’re none of us confined to the territory they discovered. It’s just the starting point.

How can we create the literature of the strange if we stay in well-mapped lands?

2. World Creation

Stories start working on you in a thousand different ways. I’m going to give you some personal examples, so you can see something of the process one writer goes through. The point is not that you should do it my way, but rather that there is no right way to come up with a story concept.
1. Where Ideas Come From

I was sixteen, and my older brother’s girlfriend (now his wife) had urged me to read Isaac Asimov”s Foundation trilogy
(Foundation, Foundation and Empire,
and
Second Foundation).
It had been years since I last read science fiction regularly, but these books so enthralled me that I wanted not only to read more science fiction, but also to try writing it. At the time I supposed that to write a science fiction story you had to come up with a futuristic idea. My older brother, Bill, was in the army, having just returned from a tour of duty in Korea, and so military thoughts were on my mind.

One day as my father was driving me to school through the bottomlands of the Provo River in Utah, I began trying to imagine what kind of wargames would be developed to train soldiers for combat in space. It would be useless to have land-based training games, since that wouldn’t prepare you for three-dimensional fighting in the null-gravity environment of space. Even training in airplanes would be pointless, since there is still a definite horizontal orientation to flying in an atmosphere- straight up and straight down are very different from straight across!

So the only place where soldiers could train to think and move easily and naturally in space combat would be outside the gravity well of any planet. It couldn’t be in open space-you’d lose too many trainees that way, drifting off in the midst of the game. So there had to be a huge

Enclosed in a null-G environment, with variable gridworks and obstacles changing from game to game, so the trainees could simulate fighting among spaceships or the debris of battle.

I imagined that they would play with small handheld lasers, while wearing suits of body armor that would serve a double purpose-to protect them against damage from collisions during mock battles, and also to electronically record when someone scored a hit on your body. If you were hit in the leg, your leg would become immobile; if you were hit in the head or body, your whole suit would freeze. But you would remain present in the battle, drifting just like a corpse, serving as one more obstacle or bit of cover.

This was in 1968. I didn’t get around to writing the story “Ender’s Game” until 1975. That’s because the battleroom wasn’t a story, it was merely a setting-and not a complete milieu, either, since the soldiers training there wouldn’t be in the battleroom twenty-four hours a day. There had to be a whole universe built up around the battleroom, and I was too young and inexperienced to know the questions that had to be asked.

In 1975, 1 asked them. Who was the enemy they were training to fight’ Other humans? No, aliens-and cliche aliens at that. Bug-eyed monsters. Our worst nightmares, only now they were here in real life. And who were the trainees? Not combat soldiers, I decided, but rather people being trained to pilot starships into battle. The point was not to learn hand-tohand combat, but rather to learn how to move quickly and efficiently, how to plan, how to take and give orders, and above all how to think threedimensionally.

And then I asked the question that made all the difference. I knew that, having gladly missed out on combat in Vietnam, I hadn’t the experience to write about the lives of men in combat. But what if they weren’t men at all? What if they were children? What if the starships they’d be piloting were actually billions of miles away, and the kids thought they were playing games?

Now I had a world: humans fighting off alien invaders, with children as the commanders of their fleet. There was still a lot of work to do, but it was a simple matter to come up with my main character, the young child whose genius in threedimensional combat in the battleroom would make him the ideal choice to command the human fleet.

Notice, though, that I didn’t have even the seed of a good science fiction

story until after I had a clear idea of the world in which the story would take place.

The same thing is true of fantasy. Another personal example:

I like to draw maps. That’s how I doodle when other people are talking, by drawing coastlines and then putting in mountains, rivers, cities, national boundaries. Then, if the map that results intrigues me, I begin to make up more information-which nations speak the same language, what their history has been, which nations are prospering, which waning.

In 1976 I was cast in a musical comedy playing in Salt Lake City. We rehearsed in an old building downtown that was scheduled for demolition to make way for the new Crossroads Mall. In one corner of the rehearsal area there was a pile of junk-broken chairs, tilting shelves, stuff that was utterly useless. But amid the garbage I found a ream of onionskin paper of an odd size, larger than normal. I can’t let paper like that go to waste! So I brought it home and saved it.

Now it’s 1979. I’m living in a house in Sandy, Utah, working on the first draft of my novel Saints. I’m also on a radical diet losing about a billion pounds. My wife and son are down in Orem, Utah, living with her parents so they can take care of her and Geoffrey while she recovers from a miscarriage; I can’t do it because I have a deadline to meet. So I’m hungry, tired, and lonely.

One night, exhausted from writing, I wander around the house and find that ream of outsize paper, saved all those years and never used. I grab a few sheets and head upstairs. The TV goes on, I lie on the bed, lay a sheet of paper atop a notebook, and begin to doodle a map while I listen to the Channel 2 news and then the Carson show.

Only this time, I doodle a different kind of map. After all, this paper cries out for something special, and I’m tired of coastlines and continents. I trace a bend in a river, and instead of dots for cities, I begin drawing tiny squares and rectangles to represent buildings, with gaps marking the streets. Heavy lines denote the walls of a castle; more heavy lines show the city walls. And I put gates in the walls.

A few nights later, the map is finished. Now it’s time for naming. I had put in a few religious sites; the gate that leads into the main temple area gets the name “God’s Gate.” The gate near the commercial area is named “Asses’ Gate” because that’s the beast of burden the merchants use. One riverside gate, leading to the main street through the city, is “King’s Gate”;

another, near the animal stalls outside the city and leading directly to the Great Market, is “Grocers’ Gate.”

Then the idea occurs to me that maybe when you enter at a particular gate, you get a certain kind of pass that limits you to certain areas and activities in the city inside the wall. If you come in at one gate, you find a completely different kind of city from the one you find when you enter at another. Come in as a pilgrim through God’s Gate, and you don’t leave the temple area. Come in as a grocer and you have the run of the market but can’t go near the trading floors.

Knowing this, I crudely named the gate near the poor section of town, with hundreds of tiny houses, “Piss Gate,” because people who entered there only had a three-day pass allowing them to attempt to find work; if they remained after three days, they were imprisoned or killed or sold into slavery. A hopeless, desperate way to enter the city.

But not the most hopeless way. For there was one gate that, in the process of drawing, I had accidently drawn with no gap between the two towers that guarded it. Even after slightly redrawing the towers, there was no gap between them. Unless I resorted to Liquid Paper, that entrance to the city was spoiled.

Except that I believe, when it comes to storytelling-and making up maps of imaginary lands is a kind of storytelling-that mistakes are often the beginning of the best ideas. After all, a mistake wasn’t
planned.
It isn’t likely to 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. So I thought-what if this gate has been permanently closed off? I drew houses right across both faces of the gate. That explained why there was no gap between the towers.

Now, as I was naming all the gates, I had to wonder why this gate had been closed. And then I realized that this gate was closed because it had been the magical way into the city. A walled city spoke of medieval times; what could be more natural than to have this be the setting for a fantasy? The political powers in the city would naturally resent or fear the rival power of magicians; the gate would have been closed years ago. Only it wasn’t closed completely. You can still get through, if you can pay the right bribes, but you enter the city as a criminal, with no pass at all, and the city you find is a dark, dangerous, magical one where the rules of nature don’t work the way they used to.

It happened that this closed gate was near a section of town where I had drawn a small shrine that, for reasons I cannot remember, I had already named “Hart’s Hope.” I decided that this magical gate had once been the main route into the city, back when the Hart was the god of this place, long before the god called God came to be worshipped in the temple in the southeast corner. So the worshippers of the old god, the Hart, would enter town through this gateway.

Did I have a story? By no means. I still didn’t even have a world. I set the map aside.

Around that time, the TV news was full of stories about a couple in Layton, Utah, who had just given birth to twins conjoined at the top of their heads. It was a tricky operation to separate them, and the photos before they were separated were disturbingly alien. But, being a perverse sort of person, I tried to imagine what could be
worse.
Not more lifethreatening-simply worse to
see.
Worse to live through.

I came up with the idea of two sisters who were born joined at the face. One sister was staring directly into her twin’s face; after separation, her face would be a blank mask, with no eyes, no real nose, and only a gap for a mouth. The other twin, though, was facing half away; after separation, while one eye was missing and one cheek was a ruin, her profile from the other side would look perfectly normal. Which sister suffered more, the one who would never see how hideous she was, would never look at others looking away from her? Or the one who, by turning her face just so, could catch a glimpse of how beautiful she and her sister could have been; and then, by staring at herself full in the face in the mirror, could see just how hideously deformed she was?

I even tried writing a story about these sisters. The draft is lost, which is just as well-it was going nowhere.

Around that time I discovered the writings of Mary Renault. When I read her book
The
King
Must Die,
in which the ancient Greek women have a separate, older religion which secretly rivals the public religion of the men, I realized that there mustn’t be merely two rival gods in the city I had drawn-the Hart and the god named God-there must be another tradition of worship. A women’s religion, and the god would be the Sweet Sisters, those two women who were born joined at the face. One of them was permanently staring inward, contemplating the inner secrets of the universe, breathing only the breath that her sister had already inhaled; while the other, seeing half in and half out, was able to see our world and

communicate with her worshippers. However, at the time of my story whatever it would be-the two sisters had been forcibly separated, thereby making it impossible for
either
to see into the mind of God. The one was blind, remembering only the sight of the infinite; the other, with her single eye, could remember only the mortal world that constantly impinged on her vision.

Who would have the power to separate these women? I thought at first that it must be the god named God, and that the Hart would eventually ally with them and rejoin them. But that would be a story about gods, and that wouldn’t be interesting even to me. So instead I knew it had to be a mortal who had somehow gained enough power to tame not only the Sweet Sisters, but also the Hart and the god named God.

Did I have a story yet? No. I had a map of a fascinating city fascinating to me, at least) and a trio-temporarily a quartet-of gods.

I began teaching a science fiction writing class at the University of Utah, and on the first day of class, when there were no stories to critique, I began a spur-of-themoment exercise designed simply to show that science fiction and fantasy ideas are ridiculously easy to come up with. I asked questions; they improvised answers; and out of the answers, we made stories. To my surprise, the idea was not just a fiveminute exercise-it became a fun, exciting session that took almost the whole period. I have since used the process in every class or workshop I’ve taught, and have put on a “Thousand Ideas in an Hour” session at almost every science fiction convention I’ve attended and every school I’ve visited. Not only is the process always entertaining, but also the results are always different and
always
workable as stories.

To wit: At the very first session, I asked them to think of the “price of magic.” In a fantasy, if magic has no limitations, the characters are omnipotent gods; anything can happen, and so there’s no story. There have to be strict limits on magic.
Dungeons and Dragons
uses a seniority system that may work well for games, but for stories it is truly stupid: The longer you manage to stay alive, the more spells you know and the more power you have. I wanted my students to come up with better limitations, and I wanted them to think of it as a price to be paid for every bit of magical power that was used.

BOOK: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
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