How to Write Science Fiction

Creating your Universe - Part 2 - Planning

Having a Think, Planning

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.” - Alan Lakein

A slightly coarser version of the above is an old army adage that often gets bandied around in classrooms "Proper planning prevents piss poor performance" and, as mentioned before, some planning at least can really help to focus the mind on where the story is going.

It’s all too easy to let all the ideas and characters you have buzzing around in your head jump out onto the page in a swathe of glorious space battles, or a panoply of horror strewn dystopia, but often all you’ll do is get yourself in a muddle. SciFi or any subgenre of the greater Fi is a great thing to write, but as with most writing, proper planning prevents piss poor performance. The What, Why, When, Where, and Who of things we mentioned earlier is important, and that questioning process never really stops as you write each chapter of your story. Sometimes “did that actually make sense to the reader?” is a really basic question you need to ask yourself. As a writer, it’s very easy to get so utterly immersed in your own world, character or scene that you can forget how little the reader has been told thus far.

Think before you write!

If you’ve not tried to write a story before, a useful way to model the story is by planning it around a skeleton. Your idea forms the nucleus of the skeleton and from there you want to work out your start, middle and end, and the basic A to B storyline. Again, using our Military SciFi example from earlier, the basic storyline might be:

- Young Slave escapes clutches of evil master

- Stows away on a transporter ship heading for World X

- Gets intercepted by Rebels

- He decides to join them

- Gets trained up

- Goes into battle but gets lost in space

- Survives but learns information about the Rebels that puts into doubt his allegiance

- Hooks up with a few others like him

- Battles Rebels

- Wins but comes to attention of the people behind the Slavery trade

- Next Battle

- Triumphs but at what cost?

From that loose collection of sub-ideas you can then begin to flesh out your main storyline, add in additional characters, sub-plots, worlds, and the remaining universe which you’ve already been thinking about for months on the bus to work or school.

All of the points above of course lead to yet more questions you have to ask yourself. And you also have to be able to answer them, or your reader may not be impressed. These of course lead to more ideas, more development and more questions. At some point you can begin to really write the story, but as well as the ideas and world building, you also have to consider the ‘edges’, and of course the genre, you’re writing in: Science Fiction.

"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction." Frederick Pohl

The quote above is definitely true for Hard SciFi, but it also holds true to some extent for the other subgenres. Science is one of the edges / boundary markers for Hard SciFi, but each of the sub-genres will have their own rules which we’ll discuss a little more later on.

Something else you really should know is how you want to end your story. The end doesn’t have to be set in stone, but you need to be able to tie up your story, or relevant parts of it if you’re writing a series, at the end. Having that final marker in place gives you direction and allows you to subtly play the reader by including tidbits of information along the way. The art is to give enough information to keep them tantalized and trying to guess the ending, but without quite giving the big reveal until you want to do so. It’s a fine line, but having the ending in mind helps enormously.

Rules and Boundaries

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.” - Albert Einstein

World creation is a great thing in any genre and you can sit there doing the “What,” “How,” “Where,” and “Why” thing for days or months at a time, but part of the whole building process is putting the edges into place. You can do a jigsaw from the middle out, but starting with the corners and edges makes it a lot easier. The natural laws of your universe will give your reader some surety that giant mushrooms aren’t suddenly going to save your spaceman from a black hole, or that sentient computer mice aren’t going to rebel against their overlords and create a dystopian society where only binary language is allowed, and humans have to eat virtual cheese.

If you, as a writer, don’t understand how your universe works, then your reader will not either. Part of your job in writing any story is transporting your readers to a place where they can suspend their sense of disbelief enough to immerse themselves in, and thoroughly enjoy, your universe and your story.

That can only happen if your rules are in place.

So, what are these Rules? Well that’s largely up to you, but let’s take positronic style robots for example, as made popular by Mr Asimov. Asimov laid down three immutable laws which many writers since have used in one way or another, both consciously and unconsciously.

These Three Laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

There, immediately, you have very few laws which massively shape your universe and instantly prompt loads more questions as to what could happen in any given situation, the situation of course being where your protagonist has to exist within the rules of your universe (more on that later).

These rules are true of many of the different sub-genres of SciFi, whether you’re dealing with Dystopian, Space Opera, Cyberpunk or Sci-Fantasy. If you break your own rules whilst writing, your readers will notice, and your world will quite literally fall apart at the seams.

The most difficult trick of course is making sure you have the rules in place without having to ram them down the throat of your reader. Massive information dumps in any writing style are not good practice. But, as we’ve mentioned before, as long as you the writer have a clear idea of the universe you’ve created you’ll stand a much better chance of conveying that to your reader and taking them along with you for the ride.