How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (6 page)

Many ideas come up in such sessions, but one that came up the first time, which really stuck in my mind, was that the cost of magic was blood. How would that work? You wouldn’t prick your own finger to get power

that was too casy. It had to be enough blood from the creature that the creature’s whole life was contained in it; you could only get the power as the creature bled to death. The
amount
of power depended on the creature whose blood you used.

You could kill a fly and get the power to keep the soup from boiling over. You could kill a rabbit and make an enemy sick or heal a child. You could kill a deer -a hart! -and have the power to be invisible for hours or days. And you could kill a man and get
real
power.

But my students were just as perverse as I was. Wouldn’t you get even more power if you killed a child? After all, children have more life in them-they haven’t used up so much of it. And what if you kill your own child? Wouldn’t that give you even more power?

Yes, but what sort of person would ever do what it took to obtain such power? Ultimate power would be in the hands of monstrous people. People monstrous enough, perhaps, to separate the Sweet Sisters and imprison the Hart and the god named God.

I had the whole milieu at last. The city of Hart’s Hope was being ruled by a mortal so cruel he lulled his own child-no,
she
lulled
her
own childin order to gain so much power that she could bind the gods. And my hero would be the one who undid her power, not by killing another child, but by turning her own power against her. I wasn’t sure how that would be done, and
wouldn’t
be sure until near the end of the first draft, but I knew that my hero would have been raised up by the gods-who were not
completely
bound-to have an anti-magical power. He would be a magic sink, a person who could absorb and use up magical power without ever having the ability to use that power himself. He was a negation of power.

There was much
more
development before I was ready to write my fantasy novel
Hart’s Hope,
but I knew the world in which it took place and I knew who some of my main characters were. What lay ahead was some of the most fascinating workfleshing out the characters, discovering their unpredictable relationships with each other and with the world around them, and, finally, working out the storyline: the intersecting pathways of those characters through the world I had created.

Still, after all this planning, some of the best parts of the story came on the spur of the moment as I was writing the first draft. For instance, it never occurred to me until I found myself writing it that the god named “God” should be a feeble old man polishing woodwork in the palace of Queen Beauty; nor did any of my planning include the writing system in

which words have different meanings when read forward and backward, or when interpreted as numbers. But such impromptu additions would not have been possible had I not laid down many strata of creation before I started that draft.

The Ripening Idea

The first thing you should learn from these two examples is that no two stories are developed in exactly the same way. However, in my experience one thing is constant: Good stories don’t come from trying to write a story the moment I think of the first idea. All but a handful of my stories have come from combining two completely unrelated ideas that have been following their own tracks through my imagination. And all the stories I was still proud of six months after writing them have come from ideas that ripened for many months-usually years-between the time I first thought of them and the time they were ready to put into a story.

“Great,” you say. “I pick up this book, hoping to learn how to write speculative fiction, and now this guy’s telling me that I have to wait months or years before writing stories about any new ideas I think of.”

That’s what I’m telling you: You’ll probably have to wait months or years before writing good versions of story ideas you come up with now. But you probably already have hundreds of story ideas that have been ripening inside you for many years. For some writers, one of the best ways to help an idea ripen is to try writing a draft of it, seeing what comes up when you actually try to make it into a story. As long as you recognize that the draft you write immediately after thinking of the idea will almost certainly have to be thrown away and rewritten from the beginning, you’ll be fine.

That immediate draft-or, if you are another kind of creator, the first outlines and sketches, maps and histories, jotted scenes and scraps of dialogue-is the writer’s equivalent of what a composer does when he plinks out a new theme on the piano, just to hear it. He doesn’t immediately score and orchestrate the theme-first he has to play it over and over, varying it, changing rhythms, pitches, key, imagining different voices and timbres playing the theme, imagining different harmonies and countermelodies. By the time the composer actually starts to arrange and orchestrate the piece, the theme will have been transformed many times over. The first version is all but forgotten.

Some writers have to do all their inventing before they ever try to write

out a narrative. Other writers have to try out the narrative immediately, then rework it over and over, letting new ideas come to them as they write each draft. I’m somewhere between the two extremes: I do a lot of outlining and planning before I write, until I feel that the story is ripe-but then, as I write, all kinds of new ideas come to me and I freely explore each new avenue that feels as if it might lead somewhere fun. As a result my novels almost never have much to do with the outlines I submit to the publishers at contract time-but since the novels are always much
better
than the outlines, the publishers haven’t complained yet.

The Idea Net

The second thing you should learn from my examples is that ideas come from everywhere, provided that you’re thinking about everything that happens to you as a potential story. I like to think that the difference between storytellers and non-storytellers is that we storytellers, like fishermen, are constantly dragging an “idea net” alongwith us. Otherpeople pass through their lives and never notice how many stories are going on all around them; we, however, think of everything as a potential story.

And the idea net consists of three questions: “Why?” “How?” and “What result?” The first question is really two: When you ask, “Why did John slap Mary across the face?” I can answer with either the first cause, “Because she slapped him,” or the final cause, “In order to show her who was boss.” Both might be true at the same time. The first cause is like dominoes: Domino B fell over because Domino A fell first and pushed it. The final cause deals with purpose, with
intent:
Someone performs an action
in order to
bring about some desired result.

Both causes are acting on characters in stories all the time, and you must know answers to both kinds of “why” before you understand your characters.

In fact, to write stories that are any good at all, you have to realize that there is never just one answer to
any
of these questions. Every event has more than one cause and more than one result. When John slapped Mary, not only did she act more timidly around him, but also she resented him and constantly worked to find ways to make him suffer for having hit her.

Furthermore, John himself never realized that he was the kind of man who slapped women. Even though he excused himself by telling himself that after all, she slapped him first, it still gnawed at him that he had hit her; he felt guilty and tried to make it up to her.

Even that is too easy. Consciously, John feels guilty. Unconsciously, he’s rather proud of it. He had never hit anyone in his life till now, and at the moment he struck Mary, he felt a sense of raw power that he had never felt. It made him a bit more belligerent, made him strut a little in his dealings with others. In fact, the unconscious psychological pay-off was strong enough that he will seek, without knowing it, excuses to slap and hit and push more people. Especially Mary.

And Mary’s resentment and subtle rebellion are also not complicated enough to be a fair representative of reality. Perhaps it gradually dawns on her that John is becoming even
more
domineering-her only way out is to leave him. So she leaves, taking the children with her, and he, feeling completely unmanned by this, begins to follow her. He tells himself that he’s trying to find her in order to make it up to her and help take care of the children; even if she doesn’t want him back, he has a right to see his kids. But unconsciously, he’s following her in order to beat her up again, maybe kill
her-then she’ll
know who’s boss.

Or perhaps Mary’s unconscious reaction is completely different. Maybe she was raised by a strong father or mother who slapped the family around. Maybe she unconsciously wanted John to act out this physically domineering role, and it wasn’t until she slapped him herself that he actually did what she wanted. So her subtle vengeances for his violence are really provocations. She stays with him, unconsciously hoping to continue provoking him into violence so she can fear and admire him the way she feared and admired her battering parent. Her unconscious strategy is completely successful; John finds himself hitting her more and more often. But he can’t bear to be the person she is turning him into-he leaves
her.

Or maybe they stay together and raise another generation just like them.

Or maybe there are still
more
results-and more hidden causes and motives-that will change the shape of the story. I hope you see, though, that with every variation, every new layer of cause and effect, the characters-and the story-become richer, deeper, more complex, and potentially more truthful and insightful.

This is not limited to individual characters. Nothing is sillier than a story that has some great event in the world that provokes only
one
response from society at large. Never in the history of the world has any society been perfectly unanimous in its response to any event. Nor has any innovation been introduced into the world without unpredictable side effects. When the car was invented and popularized, no one could have

imagined that it would lead to the drive-in movie and the drive-up bank, to freeways and double-trailer trucks, to pollution and the greenhouse effect and the political ramifications of OPEC, and to the gathering of wealth and military power by a handful of Islamic nations, giving them influence in the world far beyond what their population and other resources would warrant.

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!

2. Make Rules for Your World

So far, world creation sounds like a marvelous free-for-all, in which you come up with all kinds of ideas, ask “why” and “how” and “what result” a lot, and when there’s a really big pile of good stuff, you sit down and write.

I wish it were that easy. But that big pile of neat ideas is just that-a pile, shapeless, chaotic. Before you can tell a meaningful story, you have to hone and sharpen your understanding of the world, and that begins with the fundamental rules, the natural laws.

Remember, because speculative fiction always differs from the knowable world, the reader is uncertain about what can and can’t happen in the story until the writer has spelled out the rules. And you, as a writer, can’t be certain of anything until you know the rules as well.

Rules of Starflight

Take space travel, for instance. Why would a story need space travel at all?

One reason might be simply that you want a landscape completely different from Earth. Another might be that you want your story to take place in a developing society, a frontier that is so far away from settled places that your characters can’t call for help and expect it to come anytime soon.

But let’s say your reason is even more basic. Your story centers around an alien society that you have thoroughly developed. The aliens live in an

environment that is pretty much Earthlike, so that either species can live in the other’s habitat. But the aliens are strange enough that there’s no way they could have evolved on Earth. So you have to put them on another planet.

Other planets in our solar system just won’t do. Despite speculation in earlier years, the Voyager 11 photographs seem to confirm that not only is there no planet or moon remotely suitable for Earthlike life, there isn’t much chance of any kind of life at all. So your aliens are going to have to inhabit a planet in another star system.

This poses no problem if there are no humans in your story. If the story takes place entirely within the alien society, with no human perspective at all, then space travel plays no role in your story. But this sort of storyaliens but no humans-is fairly rare in science fiction, and for good reason. The presence of humans in a story about aliens, even if the story is told from the alien point of view, gives the reader (who is quite likely to be human) a frame of reference, a way to contrast the aliens with the humans and see exactly how the aliens are different and how this affects their society.