Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction:- Article 2

By Rahul Mishra

(Link to Article 1: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/writing-fantasy-science-fiction-1-rahul-mishra/ )

The really in-depth look at how to midwife your idea into an honest -to -goodness no-fooling books.

Writers Need Multiple Brains

English classes will occasionally lapse into an overly-artistic side of writing—the “dance through tulips and talk about your feelings” style of writing. This is fine, just not for everybody, and it’s tough to sell it for money. Artistic vision is not super-great at paying the bills.

You are a craftsperson: you are trying to become a person who makes good art (not just make good art) and you are trying to do that through practice over time.

However, you are also a businessperson, whose job it is to find a way to feed that craftsperson so they can go on dancing through tulips and waxing eloquent about the human condition.

The Craftsperson’s job is to produce the best available work; the Businessperson’s job is to exploit that in every way possible. This means that when the manuscript is complete, the Businessperson smashes the Craftsperson over the head with a blunt object, stuffs their body in a closet, and runs away with the manuscript with the express intention of making money from it.

Why Form Matters

I recall a time from my school days when I played drums. I played it for several years and was at least an adequate player—but, I couldn’t improve. I could hear the mistakes in my head, but couldn’t correct them through the sticks in my hands. This baffled me for some time until a teacher ordered me to use a metronome to keep the timing. Once I had it, I could improvise much more impressively.

Drums are magnificently free and improvisational instruments—but it is built on a rigid foundation of tempo.

Storytelling

The stories can be broken down into three primary components: plot, setting, and character. They are held together by conflict. “Learning the tempo” is simply this: learn what makes an engaging plot, an intriguing character, and an interesting setting.

Conflict

Why is conflict important? Why does it hold the story together?

● Nobody likes a story where nothing happens. “The king died and then the queen died” is not a story; “the king died and then the queen died of grief” is a story.

● A story is about what somebody wants and why they can’t have it. Kurt Vonnegut advises, “Have your character start out desperately wanting something, even if it’s just a glass of water.” If your character starts out wanting something they can’t have, you have immediate sympathy for that character and an immediate telegraphing to the reader of what’s going to happen.

Plot

The plot is making a series of promises to the reader and fulfilling them in unexpected, yet satisfying, ways. Many fledgling writers make the mistake of giving the wrong promises—starting off a romance story with an action--adventure opening scene, perhaps.

Character

Usually what we are looking for is a relatable character. Occasionally you can get away with an unsympathetic, unrelatable character—but it’s very hard to do and people probably won’t like your book. Your main character doesn’t have to be a “good guy.” S/he just needs to have a few characteristics:

● Sympathetic (available ways to be sympathetic: be nice, wounded, disadvantaged, idealistic, principled, etc)

● Active (driven to accomplish something; this ties back to the character desperately wanting something. “Protagonists gonna protag.”)

● Competence (capable of accomplishing at least a few things)

Two out of three can make for a very strong character.

● Sympathetic + Competent = Bilbo Baggins, surprisingly enough

● Sympathetic + Active = Harry Potter

● Active + Competent = Sherlock Holmes

When you shove all three into one character, you get books about how awesome the character is. James Bond and Dirk Pitt are good examples: they start off being awesome, they solve problems by being awesome, and at the end of the book—oh, look, they’re awesome. These characters can be just as boring as characters who have only one of the three.

Setting

This is just as much a concern for romance and suspense writers as it is for sci--fi/fantasy writers: whatever book you’re writing, you are going to give the reader a sense of your world. You decide the rules of this world—for instance, in Jane Austen’s work, the underlying rule of the world is “The romantic interests end up together.” The setting will probably have a significant role in your story’s thematic underpinnings; for instance, Django Unchained has a major anti-slavery theme, but that can only exist if the setting pushes the prevalence of slavery (so that the main characters can rebel against the prevalence).

In some stories (notably fantasy and sci-fi), the setting is the main character; these novelists are concerned with immersion. Other stories use a lighter brush, giving pride of place to plot and character. It’s all about choosing what to accomplish.

Conflict

The easy pickings for the story are finding a place where you can generate friction between two of those three components or all three. (Usually, it’s going to be between Character and one of the others.) “A heretic in a world of believers” is a Character vs. Setting. “The wizard wants me to do this but I don’t WANNA” is Character vs. Plot. Character vs. Character is self-explanatory.

Prose

One of the significant choices in how you tell your story is what kind of prose and style you want to use. These include decisions like:

● Viewpoint (whose head we are in, and how deeply)

● Tense (past/present/future)

● Floweriness (this one is a scale going from “terse” to “purple”)

Nailing Your Ideas

A cool idea doesn’t make a great story; a great writer makes a great story. Still, if you can have your cake and eat it...

Try to have a few story hooks for yourself. Shoot for, perhaps, two-character hooks, one plot

hook, and one setting hook. Your plot hook is deciding what kind of archetype your story will align with. Really, you’re looking for what’s going to change. If you’re doing a novella, you want just one major change; in novels, you can afford to have more. What’s your beginning, what’s your end, and what’s going to change? That’ll decide your plot.

● Overcoming the Monster—there’s a supernaturally bad baddie out there, and it has a precious prize (like a princess or ancestral sword) and I need to kill it dead.

For example- the Mario video games, Lord of the Rings.

● Rags to Riches—a commoner embarks on a series of adventures, which culminate in their ascension to one of The Elite (and often an opportunity to enact revenge on those who abused them previously).

Example- Cinderella.

● The Quest—there is something awesome eight bazillion miles away, and I need to get

there (on foot!).

For example: Treasure Island, Lord of the Rings

● Voyage and Return—after falling into a strange and fantastical world, the protagonist

attempts to get home, returning as an utterly different person.

For Example: Jumanji, Neverwhere, Alice in Wonderland

● Comedy—a misunderstanding leads to another misunderstanding, which leads to

another misunderstanding, which culminates in an enormous misunderstanding, all of

which are cleared up in hilarious ways. cf. I don’t even know, the page lists a bunch of

examples that are older than anyone likely to read this.

● Tragedy—a character longs for something he should not have, and acquires it at a

devastating cost.

For example: Lolita, Anna Karenina, Faust, Breaking Bad

● Rebirth—a character falls into something like a living death and is brought out by a

redeeming, often sacrificial act.

For example: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Christianity

(These plots can be combined, subverted, inverted, blatantly defied, and otherwise messed with in any way you care to try.)

A good strategy for finding a setting hook is just to look for something fun to play with. Fantasists can get away with a lot here: cool religions, cool magic systems, cool technologies, cool biomes, cool cultures. Look for something that will make your reader at least mildly intrigued by the world’s possibilities.

Your character hook will boil down largely to what the character wants. Look for an interesting desire, or conflict, or past, or something like that. Be especially interested in setting them at odds with whatever is going to happen to them: Bilbo is interesting because he simultaneously wants and does not want to go on an adventure. Really, what you’re interested in is making your character ripe for lots and lots and lots of conflict.

A few broad and remarkable bits of advice:

● If your story involves a cliche, make your story about something else. You can afford to have a cliche if it’s in the background.

● Focus on something you haven’t seen done before or something you have seen done but done in a different way.

● Look for what promise you want to fulfill at the end.

● After determining the most interesting ending, figure out what breed of a story it is. A Big Problem? A Relationship? A Mystery? These will determine the major complications.

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