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THE GUIDE TO WRITING
FANTASY AND
SCIENCE FICTION
6 Steps to Writing and
Publishing Your Bestseller!
PHILIP ATHANS
Introduction and Original Story by R. A. Salvatore
CONTENTS
Introduction by R. A. Salvatore
Welcome to The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction
PART I: THE GENRES
CHAPTER 1 What Is Fantasy?
CHAPTER 2 What Is Science Fiction?
CHAPTER 3 Know Your Audience
PART II: THE SIX STEPS
Step One: Storytelling
CHAPTER 4 Start with an Idea
CHAPTER 5 Have Something to Say
CHAPTER 6 Develop a Plot
CHAPTER 7 Know When to Stop
CHAPTER 8 Learn How to Write
Step Two: Characters
CHAPTER 9 Ask, and Answer, Questions
CHAPTER 10 Start with the Villain
CHAPTER 11 Nurture Your Heroes
CHAPTER 12 Gather Your Supporting Characters
CHAPTER 13 Give Them Voice
Step Three: The World
CHAPTER 14 Decide on a Setting
CHAPTER 15 Build the World
CHAPTER 16 Know Your Geography
CHAPTER 17 Fill Your World with Monsters
CHAPTER 18 Fill Your World with People
CHAPTER 19 Take Us to Their Leader
Step Four: Details
CHAPTER 20 When in Zyltariia…
CHAPTER 21 Define a System of Weights and Measures
CHAPTER 22 Speak the Language
CHAPTER 23 Render Unto Gorthak What Is Gorthak’s
CHAPTER 24 It’s Not Fantasy Without Magic
CHAPTER 25 It’s Not Science Fiction Without Technology
Step Five: Nuts and Bolts
CHAPTER 26 Don’t Spare the Action
CHAPTER 27 Everyone Needs a Little Romance
CHAPTER 28 Use Humor with Care
Step Six: Finishing Touches
CHAPTER 29 Keep It Fresh
CHAPTER 30 Avoid Anachronisms
CHAPTER 31 Follow Your Own Rules
PART III: THE BUSINESS
CHAPTER 32 Get Published
CHAPTER 33 Do It for a Living
CHAPTER 34 Embrace the Tie-in
CHAPTER 35 Move on to Film and Television (If You Can)
CHAPTER 36 Join the Electronic Gaming Revolution
PART IV: HUGO MANN’S PERFECT SOUL
Some Thoughts on “Hugo Mann’s Perfect Soul”
“HUGO MANN’S PERFECT SOUL”: A Short Story
By R.A. Salvatore
CONCLUSION Never Fear
INTRODUCTION
WHY FANTASY?
BY R. A. SALVATORE
I’m often asked that question. In fact, at one of my first convention appearances, way back in the early 1990s, a fellow asked me if I was ever going to write “a real book.” I didn’t laugh then, but I do now.
I’ve got to backtrack here and explain how I got into writing (and reading). When I was very young, I loved to make up stories, any stories, and I loved to read. I have an amazing collection of “Peanuts” books from the early 1960s. I had a deal with my mom: as long as I was getting straight As, she’d let me bag school occasionally and stay up in my room with my books.
But then something happened. As I went through school, the continual barrage of uninteresting, irrelevant (to me) and tedious reading I was assigned beat the joy of reading right out of me. You might argue with me now about whether Silas Marner or Ethan Frome are great books, but when I was in the eighth grade, they weren’t. Just thinking about them makes my skin crawl to this day.
My aversion to all things reading and writing got so bad that I went to college as a math/computer science major. My freshman year changed all that. For Christmas 1977, my sister Susan gave me a slip-covered four-book set: The Hobbit and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.
I wasn’t happy. I wanted money.
I tossed the books aside and forgot about them, but less than two months later New England got hit by the “Blizzard of ’78” (yes, it’s in quotes, and if you live in New England, you understand). My college was shut down for a week. I was nineteen and trapped at my mom’s house—or so I thought.
Out of complete boredom, I picked up those books. I opened The Hobbit to an introduction by a writer named Peter S. Beagle.
“In terms of passwords, the sixties were the time when the word progress lost its ancient holiness, an escape stopped being comically obscene… lovers of Middle-earth want to go there. I would myself, like a shot.
“… I once said that the world [Tolkien] charts was there long before him, and I still believe it. He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live…. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.”
It’s a one-page intro. Three fat paragraphs, but I thought to myself, now, that was intriguing. Then I started reading the book, and I didn’t stop. I’ve never stopped. In that one week, I read the four books at least three times. I kept saying aloud, “Why didn’t anyone give me this to read in the eighth grade instead of Silas Marner?” And I remembered! I remembered those times in my bedroom when I was a kid, alone with my books and my imagination. I remembered a hero building a rocket out of scraps from the back alley and flying it to the moon. I remembered the talking rabbits of Watership Down and the friends from The Wind in the Willows.
I changed my major so that all of my electives could be literature courses. I discovered Shakespeare and Chaucer and Dante and Twain, but I always kept a soft spot in my heart for J. R. R. Tolkien, who reminded me of the simple joy of twilight fancies, of imagination. So when I decided to write a book after graduation, I naturally went first to fantasy. Maybe it was something as simple as wanting to write a tribute to Tolkien. Partially, at least, it was because there weren’t many fantasy books on the shelves in 1982 and I had read all I could find and wanted more, even one of my own. What I didn’t realize then, in fact, what took me many years to come to appreciate was that writing in this wonderful genre would become for me a lifelong journey of personal exploration and revelation.
Perhaps more than any other genre, fantasy is about the hero’s journey. In a world of seven billion people, with wars I can’t stop and legislation I can’t even read, the idea of one person being able to make a difference, the idea of one man or woman grabbing a sword and defeating the dragon and saving the village is quite appealing.
And then there is the magic. Magic is faith, and faith is magic. Why did we all feel betrayed in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, when Lucasfilm introduced the word midiochlorian to explain the Force? Because it demystified the Force, that’s why. Because it took the Divine and made it mundane.
In a world whose mysteries are being unraveled by science, it’s often easy for the spiritual to be explained away into the secular. It’s the way of things, and a good way, I think. But at the same tim
e, as a rational, thinking creature who sees a beginning, a middle, and an end to this existence, I want more. I love the idea of something science can’t explain, for that allows me the very human hope that there is something more than this one existence. I want to believe in magic.
In my writing through the decades, I’ve followed heroes on this same journey, trying to make sense of their winding and surprising road, trying to do what’s right and just, even when it’s most difficult. The trappings of a fantasy setting allow me to walk the hero’s journey, physically and spiritually, to examine the role of a god or gods without tapping the prejudices of real religions, to crystallize the responsibilities to self and community in the face of fantastical danger, and to play with themes of our own world, like racism and sexism, in a safe enough environment to allow both the reader and this writer to let down our natural defensiveness regarding our own foibles and look at the issues honestly.
Because in fantasy perhaps more than in any other genre, the character is rewarded for making the right choices and punished for making the bad.
Ask Boromir.
R. A. Salvatore
January 12, 2010
WELCOME TO THE GUIDE
TO WRITING FANTASY AND
SCIENCE FICTION
“Fantasy is the endless optimism that one
person can make a difference.”
—R. A. SALVATORE, creator of The Legend of Drizzt
I can’t really remember my first encounter with either fantasy or science fiction. Most likely I had, as a newborn infant, some kind of funny little stuffed unicorn or pacifier in the shape of a turtle smoking a cigar (I was born in 1964, when they used to make stuff like that). Either of those are products of fantasy. Science fiction was likewise everywhere in the early 1960s, when the United States and the Soviet Union were deep into the Space Race. Growing up in the sixties and seventies, I watched a lot of TV, especially science fiction and fantasy shows like Star Trek, The Banana Splits, Space Ghost, and Lost in Space, and old movies like Forbidden Planet and The Amazing Colossal Man, which ran on Saturdays on the fuzzy UHF channels.
Today fantasy and science fiction is everywhere, spread across all media from television to the movies to novels and short stories. I’m willing to bet that, like me, you’ve read J. R. R. Tolkien and/or J. K. Rowling—or Isaac Asimov and/or William Gibson—and said, “I want to do that.” You want to be a writer.
I remember writing “books” as soon as I was literate: little pencil-and-crayon affairs lovingly crafted using whatever scraps of paper I could fold. One was called Red vs. Black, because I had a red ballpoint pen and a black ballpoint pen, and it just made sense to me that stick figures drawn with one would be the natural enemies of stick figures drawn with the other. My mother gave what we thought was the full collection to my second-grade teacher, who thought I was mentally disabled. (I wasn’t disabled—I was shy—and my books were meant to prove that I wasn’t “special.”) Then the teacher lost ’em. I would give her life to have them back now. A scant few survived, recently discovered in a box in the garage, including my Godzilla knockoff, Giszingo; The $10,000,000 Man; and the comic book epic Dizes Dager (featured on my blog: http://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/dizes-dager/).
All of my early works were science fiction stories. Then one day I read a copy of the Marvel Comics Conan adaptations. Though I don’t remember exactly how old I was, I sure remember that comic book. I still have it, now lovingly stored in plastic with an acid-free backing, in a box with the rest of my comic book collection, in a corner of my closet where my kids can’t touch them until they’re old enough to take care of them. In other words, forty.
From there I went on to read the original Robert E. Howard Conan stories, then Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars series, and on and on. I was equally hooked on fantasy and science fiction, thanks to the television series Lost in Space and a book that actually made me cry, The Runaway Robot by Lester del Rey. When I read a short story by Harlan Ellison called “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” I said, “I want to do that.” Not in the Red vs. Black sense. I wanted to do that.
* * *
A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
As an editor and author of fantasy novels, I have one of the greatest jobs in the world. This book is my way of letting you in on some of the things I’ve learned along the way. I also contacted some friends and associates—authors, agents, editors, and others—who lent their time to answer e-mailed questions and add their voices, experience, and advice to this book.
* * *
The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction isn’t meant to cover every bit of the writing process. There are plenty of books on things like grammar and usage, finding an agent, reading a book contract, and so on, so I’m not going to waste lots of space on that stuff. Instead I’ll provide advice from someone who’s “been there,” and been there for a while now.
Let’s start at the beginning.
PART I
THE GENRES
“Personally, I don’t prefer one kind of fantasy over another. All I care about is the execution.”
—PAUL WITCOVER, author of Waking Beauty and Everland
What is fantasy, and what is science fiction?
It could be that if you ask a hundred different people you’d get a hundred different answers, but in basic terms, fantasy is fiction that depends on magical or supernatural elements not specifically meant to scare you—if it scares you, at least as its primary goal, it’s horror. If the magical elements are replaced with imagined technologies, it’s science fiction.
But broad definitions aren’t always good enough, so let’s get more specific.
CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS FANTASY?
Fantasy fans, authors, critics, and editors alike will argue, sometimes heatedly, over the definitions of the various subgenres of fantasy, but for our purpose, here are mine.
EPIC FANTASY
This is the foundation on which the modern fantasy genre is based. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the center around which all later epic fantasies have been built. Epic fantasies are huge in scope, most of them are long—more than 100,000 words—and they deal with the biggest possible issues within the novel’s milieu. Think of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series or Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth. In epic fantasies, a band of heroes will gather to do nothing less than save the world, rescue an entire universe from millennia of darkness, fight the final battle between good and evil, topple empires, and face off against the gods themselves—all against the background of a richly realized world that is entirely the product of the author’s imagination.
HIGH FANTASY
High fantasy and epic fantasy are often synonymous in the minds of most fans, and they’re closely related. The same care and detail that goes into the world building for an epic fantasy setting will usually appear in high fantasy as well, but what makes high fantasy a little different is the scope of the story. High fantasy tales are more personal than epic fantasies, more limited to the needs and desires of an individual hero. The protagonist is focused on a single villain with personal goals of his own, rather than on some world-shattering cataclysm. Often, at the end of the story, the hero has achieved his goals, but the bigger world goes on largely unaltered. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels and Robert Silverberg’s Majipoor series fit into the high fantasy subgenre.
SWORD AND SORCERY
These are tales of even smaller scope, with fewer words spent on world building and more spent on action. It wouldn’t be out of order to credit Robert E. Howard with the creation of sword and sorcery in his classic tales of Conan, Kull, and others. These are the stories of axe-swinging barbarians splitting their monstrous enemies in twain. Blood is liberally spilled, heads are lopped off here and there, and sexy femmes fatales always need rescuing and are often less than chaste in the way they show their appreciation. This is fantasy for guys. I like to call it “results-oriented” fic
tion: there’s the bad guy, and when he’s killed, the story is over.
DARK FANTASY
Dark fantasy should not be confused with horror, because dark fantasy isn’t necessarily scary. Rather, it is defined by its approach. In a dark fantasy story, the heroes may not win. In fact, they may not be traditional heroes at all, but antiheroes: people who are morally and ethically ambiguous. The world building is equally dark—the stories are set where evil has triumphed over good, survival of the fittest reigns, and virtue is not necessarily its own reward. H. P. Lovecraft is as well known as an author of dark fantasy as he is an author of traditional horror. Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series is a good example as well.
CONTEMPORARY FANTASY
Some call this urban fantasy, and it freely intermingles with the horror genre, liberally trading situations and monsters (especially vampires and werewolves), but contemporary fantasy, unlike horror, is not meant to scare you. Though the story depends on magic and supernatural elements, it’s set in the “real” world, our Earth, maybe even the city you live in, and in the present day, or close enough that it won’t be pegged as either science fiction or historical fantasy. Jim Butcher’s popular Dresden Files series is a successful example of contemporary/urban fantasy.
HISTORICAL FANTASY
Like contemporary fantasy, historical fantasy has a solid grounding in the real world, but a real world of years or centuries past. The entire history of the world is open to authors of historical fantasy. Popular fantasy novels have been set everywhere and everywhen, from Victorian England or Civil War America to feudal Japan or Classical Greece. Susanna Clarke’s seminal Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has become the gold standard for historical fantasies.
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