How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card

Have a way to share the new ideas you want to share. While good on its own, this point goes hand in hand with the next one. In Guardians of the Galaxy that’s Peter Quill (not the talking racoon). Someone to anchor the audience in this new world. If you’re exploring a completely new world with aliens, or even a drastically different world with humans, then you might want to consider making use of one character who is as close to a present day human as you can. Your piece could fall anywhere in between. A writer of soft science fiction can bend their world to fit the story they want to tell. These stories are able to focus more on the characters. Arrival doesn’t tell you how the aliens came to Earth. In the original Star Wars they don’t cover how blasters or lightspeed works. Soft science fiction has less of a focus on the technical aspects of the world and more of a focus on the people. Although we need to ask ourselves if we should. In fact, according to this article, we’re a few steps closer to making this a reality. Using sophisticated techniques, they extract the preserved blood from the mosquito, and – –Ī long needle is inserted through the amber, into the thorax of the mosquito, and makes an extraction. We see the greatly enlarged image of a mosquito through the lens. It’s intentionally vague on the details, but contains just enough to suspend disbelief.

This scene from Jurassic Park illustrates hard sci-fi perfectly. This allows for a concrete world where most of the rules are firmly grounded in something that people can know. Hard sci-fi means that everything is based soundly in science, or at least in speculative science. Soft Sci-Fiīefore you even begin outlining your three-act-structure model of screenwriting, you want to consider if your science fiction is hard or soft. Nine Tips On Writing Science Fiction Hard vs.

Think of these like training wheels to use until you reach your own unique conclusions on the genre.

With that out of the way, let’s get to some tips for writing it. My definition is fiction with elements of science that could happen, could have happened, or may never happen but allow you to explore “realistic” possibilities. In fact, I recently asked this very question to a number of writers on Twitter. You could ask ten different writers and you’d get thirteen different answers. So it’s no surprise that when I was searching for a genre, I chose to focus there. Ever since my family rented the original Star Wars movies from Blockbuster when I was a kid, I’ve loved science fiction.

How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card