McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

From the Ground Up

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The Corvidian:
Figure out how the technology works. Do they have (F)aster(T)han(L)ight travel? How about their medical tech? Then go from there. You could also have a few aliens, just make it where they stay away from humans.

x-tricks:
I’m going to say something that totally goes against what everyone else here has told you.  Don’t worry about the damn stars, how your spaceships work, or if plastic eating aliens are waiting at the edges of our solar system.

Write the story first.  Write the story first.

Because, basically, you can justify almost any event, plot point, creature or location in science fiction with enough semi-imaginary words (thank you Star Trek) and tight story-telling.  But you can’t do shit if you don’t have the story.

A first draft of a story should have almost no research in it.  It should be your characters, your plot, and the progress of events.  It’s your second (and third) drafts that you spend time looking up current string theory science.  You don’t know the name of the planet your crew has crash-landed on?  Put ‘##” there and go back later.  Don’t know how the aliens communicate but know what they’re going to say?  Put in quotes and worry about how it got there, actually, later.

If you look around the ‘net, you’ll find thousands of people who are ‘oy, I’m building a whole new universe, how do I do it?’ and most of them … they never get to the story that inspired the months and months of research.

Research is a killer for writing stories.  Do it later, not first, or it will both eat up your time and put you in a nit-picky, editorial mind-set that isn’t good for writing the actual story.

The only time this type of story first work shouldn’t be done is if you are a hard SF author – and you are specifically writing about a point of alien ecology, future technology or planetary science.  These types of hard SF authors are often scientists themselves, exploring how a point of physics they understand intimately would work in a fictional setting.  OR, if you are a gaming writer, as I am, and you have both a short turn-around for your work and the game itself needs to stand up to the curious minds of hundreds of gamers wondering how people fly from planet to planet and won't take 'they just do it' for an answer.

Some examples of science fiction that didn’t use much in the way of science fact:

Start Trek
Star Wars
BladeRunner
Outland
Stargate etc
BattleStar Galactica
You may or may not like those films or shows but any ‘hard science’ (like the reams of ‘Star Trek Tech’ books, and same for Star Wars) came after the shows gained popularity.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: x-tricks on April 11, 2007, 06:25:12 PM ---I’m going to say something that totally goes against what everyone else here has told you.  Don’t worry about the damn stars, how your spaceships work, or if plastic eating aliens are waiting at the edges of our solar system.

Write the story first.  Write the story first..

Because, basically, you can justify almost any event, plot point, creature or location in science fiction with enough semi-imaginary words (thank you Star Trek) and tight story-telling.

--- End quote ---

This isn't just bad advice. This is well-poisoning.  If all you care about is writing junk that doesn't hold together, by all means do so, but don't pretend it's anything else.

x-tricks:

--- Quote from: neurovore on April 12, 2007, 06:40:12 PM ---This isn't just bad advice. This is well-poisoning.  If all you care about is writing junk that doesn't hold together, by all means do so, but don't pretend it's anything else.

--- End quote ---

Remarkably enough, lots of research dosen't make something not junk.  And writing a complete first draft before I get bogged down in fact checking works very well for me, because I have a complete piece of work to review, which helps me determine what's important in the story and what isn't.  Research dosen't allow for that sort of triage of importance.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: x-tricks on April 12, 2007, 06:57:32 PM ---Remarkably enough, lots of research dosen't make something not junk.

--- End quote ---

Nor arguing that at all.  What I am arguing is that lack of research does at very least, open a whole pile of ways for something to be junk that aren't there otherwise.


--- Quote ---And writing a complete first draft before I get bogged down in fact checking works very well for me, because I have a complete piece of work to review, which helps me determine what's important in the story and what isn't.  Research dosen't allow for that sort of triage of importance.

--- End quote ---

How not ? If you're writing SF with any sort of underlying coherence of physical law some things are going to be physically impossible.  Seems pretty fundamental to be clear on what they are before you build a plot depending on, for example, your characters travelling from the Moon to Jupiter in ten minutes  - and if you do have a physics hack which lets them do that, you'd damn well better have thought through what that sort of tech means, what else it allows, and how it will affect society, and have the consequences in and solid, if you want the thing to be evn slightly believable.

Writing mainstream is even worse, because you don't just need to do this with science, you need to do it with history, geography, and all sorts of other stuff as well.

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