Crawford Kilian - Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy

Embarking on a writing career is a real challenge, and the tests are as frightening as anything faced by your favorite literary characters. If you urgently need to define your identity as writer, you risk failure at every step. Maybe you have a hard time telling a story. Or you can tell it but cant finish it. Maybe you can finish it but cant quit polishing it. Or you cant tell it well enough to get it published. It probably wont be a bestseller, never mind a classic that will survive you and inspire future readers to take up writing. The higher your ambitions, the farther you risk falling.

Like your characters, youre on a quest. The word quest comes from the Latin quaestio which means both a seeking and an asking. You are seeking a career as a writer, and asking whether you have the capability for it. You may not always find what you seek or get the answers you want. You know that not every quest ends in glory. But if you really have the writers vocation, youre already on your way.

One of the archetypal characters in any quest is the clever slave or dwarf who carries a bag of needments. Every time the hero gets in a jam, the dwarf whips something useful out of the bag and the quest goes on. This book may help provide your needments if youre interested in writing science fiction or fantasy.

But dont consider the advice I offer as the last word or the only word. Science fiction and fantasy can be, and should be, highly individual expressions of universal experience. My expression will not be yours. I have strong opinions about what makes good or bad SF, spellbinding fantasy, or plain old misspelled garbage. Your opinions will surely differ from mine. But if rejecting my views at least helps you articulate your own more clearly, then this book is doing its job.

Heres the job I hope it does: First, it shows you how to save time, energy, and grief by mastering the craft of storytelling as quickly as possible. Second, it suggests how to market your story as quickly as possible. And finally, it tries to persuade you to go beyond the market. If all you do is try to write for the existing market, you are betraying your craft, your readers, and yourself. If you write for yourself, to express your own vision, you improve your craft, you challenge your readers and you may even create a new market.

I use the word craft deliberately. Writers can learn craft, but not art. Only your readers can judge whether your craft has risen to the level of art. The craft of fiction is personal, idiosyncratic, finding the universal in the particular. It becomes art when it brings readers to a new state of wakefulness and sensitivity, makes readers think and feel in new ways. If you can do that, you are offering your readers a wonderful gift. Your own work may even make you think and feel differently also.

The industry of fiction, as opposed to craft, consists of interchangeable tales about all-too-familiar characters: Luke Skywalker, Mr. Spock, Conan. Like all clichs, such tales once seemed fresh and new, but their very novelty doomed them to endless repetition. Far from making readers more wakeful or sensitive, industrial-grade fiction puts them to sleep, narrows their sensitivity down to the stock response.

I know an old joke is new if youve never heard it before, and someones always encountering Conan or Luke for the first time. The excitement of that moment can give you a lifelong taste for SF or fantasy and for literature in general. If so, wonderful. But formula fiction is the opposite of writing that surprises, upsets, and changes its readers. Readers who never outgrow industrial fantasy and SF seem very sad to me because they miss all but the easiest pleasures of literature.

They are even sadder if they want to become writers. They may never have read anything but formula fiction, often copies of copies of copies. They may argue the merits of this formula writer over that one, but theyre like kids quarreling over whether Boston Pizza is better than Dominos, while remaining utterly ignorant of Italian cuisine.

Think about J. R. R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings has inspired so many imitators. What they dont imitate is Tolkien himself, who read widely and then wrote a story that sprang out of his well-educated imagination. When he did take ideas or images from earlier works, such as the elves and dwarves of fairy tale and folklore, he made them vividly his own.

So one of the arguments Im going to make is that to be a really good writer of science fiction or fantasy, you should be reading as widely and deeply outside your genre as you can. You should explore 18th-century English literature, the Latin American magic realists, the legends of Polynesia, and the plays of Aeschylus. You should read the history of the Moghul emperors of India, the sagas of medieval Iceland, and the life of physicist Richard Feynman.

Writers read, and what they write is always a commentary on what theyve read. What you learn from such reading will serve you well even if youre determined to build a career as a literary sharecropper, writing formula fiction based on someone elses ideas instead of your own.

Science fiction and fantasy spring from our love of the new and strange, not from the comfort of the old and familiar. This is why Im not fond of the clichs that now infest both genres. The only real excuse for using such clichs is to get us into a new perception of the world including a new perception of clichs themselves! Thats why Ive included links to clich lists later on in this book.