ALSO IN THE NOW WRITE! SERIES
Now Write!
Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers
Now Write! Nonfiction:
Memoir, Journalism, and Creative Nonfiction Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers
Now Write! Screenwriting:
Screenwriting Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers
Now Write! Mysteries:
Suspense, Crime, Thriller, and Other Mystery Fiction Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers
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Copyright © 2014 by Laurie Lamson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lamson, Laurie.
Now write! science fiction, fantasy and horror : speculative genre exercises from today’s best writers and teachers / Laurie Lamson.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-62529-3
1. Science fiction—Authorship. 2. Fantasy fiction—Authorship. 3. Horror tales—Authorship. 4. English language—Rhetoric—Problems, exercises, etc. I. Title.
PN3377.5.S3L35 2014 2013037258
808.3'8762—dc23
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Version_1
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF SOME OF THE MOST IMAGINATIVE, TERRIFYING, THRILLING, DELIGHTFUL, THOUGHT-PROVOKING, AND INSPIRING WRITERS:
E. B. White, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, P. L. Travers, J. R. R. Tolkien, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Dr. Seuss, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, Ira Levin, Aldous Huxley, Frank Herbert, William Golding, Philip K. Dick, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Octavia Butler, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ray Bradbury, L. Frank Baum, Isaac Asimov
CONTENTS
Also in the Now Write! Series
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Editor’s Note
UNDERSTAND YOUR SPECULATIVE GENRE
Steven Saus Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Ideas? Making Speculative Fiction Speculative
Jule Selbo Choosing Your Speculative Genre
Glenn M. Benest Writing Horror
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Introduction to the 1831 Edition of Frankenstein
Kate Bernheimer The Grimm Art of Fairy Tales
Vincent M. Wales Credibility
Lisa Renée Jones How Do Sub-genres Impact Your Creation of a Hero?
Piers Anthony Wood Knot Dew
IDEAS AND INSPIRATION
Aimee Bender The Secret Room
Kim Dower Steal from Your Dreams with a Twist of Fevered Writing
Brian James Freeman Writing About Your Childhood
Brittany Winner How to Channel Your Imagination
Vonda N. McIntyre An Exercise in Dreamsnake
Kealan Patrick Burke Walking the Dog
Sabrina Benulis Magical Inspiration
Elliot Laurence Unlimited Ideas
Steven Barnes Creativity on Demand
STORY DEVELOPMENT AND PLOTTING
Diego Valenzuela The Constant Writer: How to Plot an Entire Story in Minutes and Never Run Out of Ideas
Danika Dinsmore Put It in Space
Xaque Gruber Call of the Wylleen
Sequoia Hamilton The Joy of Six
James Wanless Tarot for Writers
Michael Reaves Freelancing Sci-Fi TV
Raymond Obstfeld When the World Turns to Shit, Why Should I Care? Character Arc in Dystopian Stories
Lois Gresh Story Endings: Where Monsters Lurk
Michael Dillon Scott Begin at the End . . .
HIGH STAKES AND TERROR
William F. Nolan Of Heroes and Villains
Christine Conradt The Eleven Tenets of Fear
Derrick D. Pete Anatomy of Choice
Todd Klick How Spielberg and Shakespeare Grab ‘Em in Five
Sara B. Cooper Bump in the Night
Ben Thompson Diabolical Evil for Beginners
Edward DeGeorge Seeking the Darkness
Lisa Morton The Setting in Horror
Jan Kozlowski Bringing Horror Home
BUILDING WORLDS
E. E. King Fact into Fiction
David Anthony Durham Think Historical
Mark Sebanc In Xanadu . . . Grounding the Fantastic
Melissa Scott Humming the Sets: World Building That Supports the Story
L. E. Modesitt, Jr. System Rules
Janice Hardy So, What Do You Know? Deepening Your World Building Through Point of View
Kij Johnson Feel Things Out
Chris Howard Building Worlds Without Boring Your Readers or Becoming the Minister for Tourism
Nancy Kress Follow the Money
THEME AND MEANING
Harlan Ellison First, There Was the Title
Pen Densham Writing into the Spiritual Unknown
Douglas McGowan Catching Up with the Future
Marc Scott Zicree Creating Your Own Science Fiction
Richard Bleiler Teaching Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers
Brianna Winner Understanding Yourself Better Through Creative Writing
Devorah Cutler-RubensteinGiving Sentience to Ordinary Objects—An Object’s Purpose
Wendy Mewes Leaping into Landscape
Eric Stener Carlson Finding Your Spirit in Speculative Writing
MEMORABLE HEROES, VILLAINS, AND MONSTERS
Diana Peterfreund Start with the Name
Karen McCoy How Characters Drive Plot
Eric Edson How We Feel a Story
Bruce McAllister The Black Unicorn
Jeffrey A. Carver Create a Power!
Derek Taylor Kent FUNdamentals of Writing
Jessica Page Morrell The Villain’s Handbook
Stacey Graham Oh, the Humanity: What Makes Monsters Tick
Mark Sevi The Uncanny Valley
Brad Schreiber Metamorphosis
COMMUNICATION AND RELATIONSHIPS
Reggie Oliver “He Do the Police in Different Voices”
James G. Anderson More Than Words Can Say
Gabrielle Moss Creating Convincing Communication Between Humans and Supern
atural Creatures
Vanessa Vaughn What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Mario Acevedo Love Between the Species
SCENE CONSTRUCTION AND STYLE
Jack Ketchum Economy
Rainbow Reed Using Your Senses
J. Michelle Newman Make It Real
Lillian Stewart Carl Describe a Spiral Staircase
Jody Lynn Nye Breaking the Was-ing Habit (and Making Friends with Your Active Verbs)
Scott Rubenstein Surprise in the Twenty-fourth Century
Lance Mazmanian Break the Compass
Simon Clark Paint It Dark: Creating an Eerie Atmosphere and Foreshadowing Ominous Events
John Skipp The Choreography of Violence
PRACTICING YOUR CRAFT
Ramsey Campbell What You Don’t Need
David Brin A Long and Lonely Road
John Shirley Writing Is Seeing
Jay Lake Flashing Yourself
Nicholas Royle Go for a Walk
Jeremy Wagner The Art of Being Horrifically Prolific
Dana Fredsti Surviving Writer’s Burnout
Peter Briggs How to Molotov Cocktail the Thorny Problem of Adaptions, Speculative and Otherwise (The Screenwriting Anarchist’s Way)
Sharon Scott Writing the Series
Joe R. Lansdale A Writer Writes
Contributor Websites/Pages
About the Editor
Permissions
EDITOR’S NOTE
When I asked if I would carry on my aunt Sherry Ellis’s legacy with another Now Write! title, I wasn’t sure. Putting these books together is a labor of love and a rather daunting task, even as a team. I was hesitant and a little anxious about taking it on by myself.
I discussed it with our wonderful Tarcher editor, Gabrielle Moss. When she got excited about the topic I had in mind, I started warming up to the idea of “flying solo.” A year later, I discovered she writes in these genres, so she also became a contributor.
I have very eclectic tastes in movies, music, and books. Before I began working on this anthology, it hadn’t occurred to me that many of my favorite works were fantasy, science fiction, and psychological horror; even many of my own projects are magic realism. I started recognizing the stories that most captured my imagination, made me think the deepest, and stayed with me the longest often fell into the speculative genre category. I’ve dedicated this book to many of my favorite authors who are no longer with us on the earthly plane.
Being popular gives the speculative genres a sort of “lowbrow,” easy-to-dismiss cultural reputation. I’ve come to see their importance, and value the fantastical approach to storytelling. At its best it can bypass our vigilant minds to explore deep, often unconscious fears and truths in a way that is manageable and supremely entertaining.
So I’m beyond pleased to share this array of insight and inspiration with all writers who dare take on the brave and meaningful work of pushing the limits of their own imaginations, and the world as we know it, to create something unique with their words.
Thanks so much to all the novelists and short story writers, movie and TV writers, poets and teachers who contributed to this anthology. A pleasure working with you.
UNDERSTAND YOUR SPECULATIVE GENRE
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
—ARTHUR C. CLARKE
“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”
—DR. SEUSS
STEVEN SAUS
Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Ideas? Making Speculative Fiction Speculative
STEVEN SAUS injects people with radioactivity as his day job, but only to serve the forces of good. His stories appear in anthologies such as Westward Weird, Blue Kingdoms: Mages & Magic, Timeshares, and Hungry for Your Love, and in several on- and off-line magazines, including On Spec, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, The Drabblecast, and Pseudopod. He publishes books including the Crimson Pact series of dark fantasy anthologies (Alliteration Ink).
“All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.“
—MAX BEERBOHM
“The hardest theme in science fiction is that of the alien. The simplest solution of all is in fact quite profound—that the real difficulty lies not in understanding what is alien, but in understanding what is self.”
—GREG BEAR
Over the last decade the hard bright lines of genre have disappeared. You can lay the blame on the reduction in physical bookstores, literary cross-genre courageousness, or the alignment of planets—but the effect is real.
The labels sci-fi, horror, and fantasy have shifted and blurred so that it is difficult to tell where the lines are anymore. Margaret Atwood refuses to label The Handmaid’s Tale as science fiction, but instead calls it speculative fiction. Is PAN’S LABYRINTH fantasy, horror, magical realism, or something else entirely? Hard science fiction, once the domain of two-dimensional characters, is now littered with fully realized personalities. You can find high fantasy written in clear journalistic prose, and horror concerns itself not just with fighting the zombies, but with offering a plausible explanation for how the zombies came to be. The need for the term dark fantasy to describe works such as the Dark Tower series and Imajica is itself a testament to the way these genre lines have bled into each other.
The blurring of genre creates readers who want something they’ve never seen before. Despite there only being two (or seven, or thirty-six) “fundamental” plots, we can still satisfy the reader’s needs by having a new combination of ideas and creating an emotional core for all your characters.
It is important to have an emotional core to your story; that is, characters well formed enough that your readers empathize with their struggle. The days of a neat idea carrying a tale alone are long gone—but those skills are not specific to speculative fiction. Characterization is characterization, even if the character is a twelve-legged bug.
But those ideas. That’s what makes speculative fiction, well . . . speculative. I don’t mean “Hamlet, but with ray-guns!” No, the best stories make the genre aspects and ideas an integral part of the story, not mere window dressing.
Coming up with those ideas—especially ones that have never been seen before—is tricky. At the very least, you need a fresh take on an earlier idea. Once you’ve found that core idea, you can begin writing your story from there. I frequently write a first draft addressing the plot and then layer in more of the emotional core of the story with the second and subsequent drafts.
This exercise goes through what I do to generate that original, central idea and the world around it. It is especially effective for short stories; you can repeat the process to come up with more ideas for a longer work. Many thanks to Donald J. Bingle and Gary A. Braunbeck for teaching me parts of this technique.
EXERCISE
1. Get a starting topic. If you’ve been assigned one by an editor, great! If not, then we need to generate a “seed” to grow our story idea from. While random word generators—such as the one at creativitygames.net/random-word-generator/randomwords can be useful, I find that pictures really work a lot better.
You can use a random picture generator on the Internet. Some examples are:
beesbuzz.biz/crap/flrig.cgi
bighugelabs.com/random.php
secure.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
I had the best luck with large packs of postcards, such as “I Feel a Sin Coming On” by Anne Taintor or “100 Maverick Postcards” by Alan Fletcher.
Two important notes:
Use the first image you see; don’t pick and choose.
Avoid “topic” images—you don’t want a picture of a starship for a sci-fi story, or elves for a fantasy story, and so on.
2. Pick only one el
ement from that image or idea. For example, let’s say the image is of a wedding. I might look at the woman’s veil and focus on that aspect.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for a cross-idea. So let’s say my second image is of a field of butterflies on flowers; I might choose the butterfly wings.
4. Force the two ideas to come together. If you have a genre in mind, let that color the idea as well.
a. Stick with the focused aspects you came up with. In this case, the butterfly wing and the veil.
b. At this point, you have one of two things: a concept, or an image. One image could be a close-up woman with a veil made of butterflies. Or a concept could be that she has to wear a veil to protect against butterflies. (Or both, for that matter.)
c. Twist the concept, if desired. (Have the man wear the veil. If they’re both the same gender, who wears the veil—or is that question the crux of the story?)
d. Ask your resulting concept or image, “Why?”—as if you were a two-year-old. Why does she (or he) need to protect herself (or himself) from butterflies? Are they real butterflies, or something that just looks like them? Where did the custom come from? Why?
5. Here’s the key to making this technique something more than mere window dressing: How is the image or concept you came up with part of the central problems facing your characters? Is that concept or image the problem (or part of the problem)? Or is it part of the solution?
Perhaps we have new colonists on an Earth-like planet where these butterfly-looking animals are attracted to the pheromones when two humans are attracted to each other—because those pheromones smell like their food. The natives have a material they use to protect themselves, but for some reason (Why? That pesky question again . . .) no humans pay attention. The conflict could be that Sue and Bob want to be the first married couple, but not be eaten alive by faux butterflies.
Now you have your story idea and a good part of the world your characters will inhabit. More to the point, you have something that makes your speculative work speculative. But that idea won’t publish itself in your head. Go forth and write, write, write.
Now Write! Page 1
