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THE CRAFT OF
WRITING SCIENCE FICTION
THAT SELLS
BEN BOVA
Author of
Mars
and
Millenium
This book is based on
Notes to a Science Fiction Writer
, © 1975 and 1981 by Ben Bova
The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells.
Copyright © 1994 by Ben Bova. Printed and bound in the United
States of America. All rights reserved.
ISBN 0-89879-600-8
To Barbara and Bill, two of the most persistent people I know.
I shall always feel respected for every one who has written a book,
let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble,
which trying to write common English could cost one.
―Charles Darwin
Chapter One
How to Get Out of the Slushpile
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished
reading one you will feel that a that happened to you and afterwards
it
all belongs to you; the goo and the
bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can
get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
―Ernest Hemingway
All my life I have been a writer.
Well, almost. As far back as I can remember I was writing stories or telling them to friends and
family When I was in junior high school I created a comic strip―
strictly for myself; I had no
thought of trying to publish
it.
And I enjoyed reading, enjoyed
it
immensely. Back in those days,
when I was borrowing all the books I was allowed to from the South Philadelphia branch of the
Free Library of Philadelphia, I had no way of knowing that every career in writing begin with a
love of reading.
It was in South Philadelphia High School for Boys (back in those sexually segregated days)
that I encountered Mr. George Paravicini, the tenth-grade English teacher and faculty advisor for
the school newspaper,
The Southron.
Under his patient guidance, I worked on the paper and
began to write fiction, as well.
Upon graduation from high school in 1949, the group of us who had produced the school
paper for three years and published a spiffy yearbook for our graduating class decided that we
would go into the magazine business. We created the nation s first magazine for teenagers,
Campus Town.
It was a huge success and a total failure. We published three issues, they were all
immediate sellouts, yet somehow we went broke. That convinced us that we probably needed to
know more than we did, and we went our separate ways to college.
While I was a staff editor of
Campus Town
I had my first fiction published. I wrote a short story
for each of those three issues. I also had a story accepted by another Philadelphia magazine, for
the princely payment of five dollars, but the magazine went bankrupt before they could publish
it.
I worked my way through Temple University, getting a degree in journalism in
1954,
then took
a reporter’s job on a suburban Philadelphia weekly newspaper,
The
Upper Darby News.
I was still writing fiction, but without much success. Like most fledgling writers, I had to work
at a nine-to-five job to buy groceries and pay the rent. I moved from newspapers to aerospace and
actually worked on the first U.S. space project, Vanguard, two years before the creation of
NASA. Eventually, I became manager of marketing for a high-powered research lab in
Massachusetts, the Avco Everett Research Laboratory. In that role I set up the first top-secret
meeting in the Pentagon to inform the Department of Defense that we had invented high-power
lasers. That was in 1966, and
it
was the beginning of what is now called the Strategic Defense
Initiative, or Star Wars.
My first novel was published in
1959,
and I began to have some success as a writer, although
still not enough success to leave Avco and become a full-time writer. By then I had a wife and
two children.
I became an editor by accident. John W. Campbell, the most powerful and influential editor in
the science fiction field, died unexpectedly. I was asked to take his place as editor of
Analog
Science Fiction-Science Fact
magazine, at that time (1971) the top magazine in the SF field. I
spent the next eleven years in New York City, as editor of
Analog
and, later,
Omni
magazine.
In 1982 I left magazine editing. I have been a full-time writer and occasional lecturer ever
since. I have written more than eighty fiction and nonfiction books, a hatful of short stories, and
hundreds of articles, reviews and opinion pieces.
THE SLUSHPILE
When I was an editor of fiction, every week I received some fifty to a hundred story manuscripts
from men and women who had never submitted a piece of fiction before. The manuscripts
stacked up on my desk daily and formed what is known in the publishing business as “the
slushpile.” Every new writer starts in the slushpile. Most writers never get out of
it.
They simply
get tired of receiving rejections and eventually quit writing.
At both
Analog
and
Omni
I personally read all the incoming manuscripts. There were no first
readers, no assistant readers. The editor read everything. It made for some very long days. And
nights. Long―
and frustrating. Because in story after story I saw the same basic mistakes being
made, the same fundamentals of storytelling being ignored. Stories that began with good ideas or
that had stretches of good writing in them would fall apart and become unpublishable simply
because the writer had overlooked―or never knew―the basic principles of storytelling.
There are good ways and poor ways to build a story, just as there are good ways and poor ways
to build a house. If the writer does not use good techniques, the story will collapse, just as when a
builder uses poor techniques his building collapses.
Every writer must bring three major factors to each story that he writes. They are ideas, artistry
and craftsmanship.
Ideas
will be discussed later in this book; suffice
it
to say for now that they are nowhere as
difficult to find and develop as most new writers fear.
Artistry
depends on the individual writer’s talent and commitment to writing. No one can teach
artistry to a writer, although many have tried. Artistry depends almost entirely on what is inside
the writer: innate talent, heart, guts and drive.
Craftsmanship
can be taught, and
it
is the one area where new writers consistently fall short. In
most cases
it
is simple lack of craftsmanship that prevents a writer from leaving the slushpile.
Like a carpenter who has never learned to drive nails straight, writers who have not learned
craftsmanship will get nothing but pain for their efforts. That is why I have written this book: to
help new writers learn a few things about the craftsmanship that goes into successful stories.
THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK
The plan of this book is straightforward. I assume that you want to write publishable fiction,
either short stories or novels. I will speak directly to you, just as if we were sitting together in my
home discussing craftsmanship face to face.
First, we will talk about science fiction, its special requirements, its special satisfactions. The
science fiction field is demanding, but
it
is the best place for new writers to begin their careers. It
is vital, exciting, and offers a close and immediate interaction between readers and writers.
In the next section of the book we will talk about the four main aspects of fiction writing:
character, background, conflict and plot. Four short stories of mine will serve as models to
illustrate the points we discuss. There are myriads of better and more popular stories to use as
examples, of course. I use four of my own because I know exactly how and why they came to be
written, what problems they presented to the writer, when they were published, where they met
my expectations, and where they failed.
Each of these four areas of study―character, background, conflict and plot―is divided into
three parts. The section begins with the chapter “Character: Theory.” After
it,
is the short story
that serves as an example, followed by the chapter “Character: Practice,” showing how the
theoretical ideas were handled in the actual story. Then come chapters on background, conflict
and plot: theory first, then a short story, followed by a chapter on practice using the story as an
illustration.
Next will come a section specifically about writing novels. We will discuss the different
demands that novels make on the writer and how successful novelists have met these challenges.
We will deal with the things you need to do before you write a novel, and then the actual writing
task. The next chapter, on marketing, will discuss how to go about selling your work, both novels
and short fiction.
Finally, there will be a wrap-up section in which we discuss ideas, style, and a few other things.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT
This book is not an exhaustive text on the techniques of writing. I assume that you know how to
construct an English sentence and how to put sentences together into readable paragraphs. We
will not spend a chapter, or even a few pages, discussing the importance of using strong verbs or
the active versus the passive voice or the proper use of adjectives and adverbs. All these things
you should have acquired in high school English classes. If you don’t understand them now, go
back and learn them before going any further.
There are many graduates of high school and college courses in creative writing who have been
taught how to write lovely paragraphs, but who have never learned how to construct a story.
Creative writing courses hardly ever teach story construction. This book deals with construction
techniques. It is intended as a practical guide for those who want to write commercial fiction and
sell
it
to magazine and book editors.
We will concentrate on the craft of writing, on the techniques of telling a story in print. Some
critics may consider this too simple, too mechanistic, for aspiring writers to care about. But, as I
said earlier,
it
is the poor craftsmanship of most stories that prevents them from being published.
Good story-writing certainly has a mechanical side to
it.
You cannot get readers interested in a
wandering, pointless tale any more than you can get someone to buy a house that has no roof.
Since the time when storytelling began, probably back in the Ice Ages, people have developed
workable, usable, successful techniques for telling their tales. Storytellers use those techniques
today, whether they are sitting around a campfire or in a Hollywood office. The techniques have
changed very little over the centuries because the human brain has not changed. We still receive
information and assimilate
it
in our minds in the same way our ancestors did. Our basic neural
wiring has not changed, so the techniques of storytelling, of putting information into that human
neural wiring, are basically unchanged.
Homer used these techniques. So did Goethe and Shakespeare.
And so will you, if and when you become a successful storyteller. I hope this book will help
you along that path.
Chapter Two
Science Fiction
If science fiction is escapist, it’s escape into reality.
―Isaac A,simov
This book is basically about science fiction writing, although the techniques for writing science
fiction can be used for any kind of fiction writing.
There are three main reasons for concentrating on science fiction, but before I enumerate
them I should define exactly what I mean by
science fiction.
DEFINITION
Science fiction stories are those in which some aspect of future science or high
technology is so integral to the story that, if you take away the science or technology, the
story collapses.
Think of
Frankenstein.
Take the scientific element out of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel
and what is left? A failed medical student and not much more.
You may be surprised to realize that most of the books and magazine stories published under
the science fiction rubric fail to meet this criterion. The science fiction category is very broad:
it
includes fantasy, horror, and speculative tales of the future in which science plays little or no part
at all.
From here on, when I say science fiction, I mean stories that meet the definition given above.
Other areas of the field I will call SF. The term
sci-fi,
which most science fiction writers loathe, I
will reserve for those motion pictures that claim to be science fiction but are actually based on
comic strips. Or worse.
THREE REASONS
The three reasons this book concentrates on science fiction story-writing are:
1. In today’s commercial fiction market, SF is one of the few areas open to new writers,
whether they are writing short stories or novels. Mysteries, gothics, romances, and other
categories of commercial fiction are much more limited and specialized, especially for the short-
story writer, but SF is as wide open as the infinite heavens. SF magazines actively seek new
writers, and SF books consistently account for roughly 10 percent of the fiction books published
each year in the United States. The SF community is quick to recognize new talent.
2. Science fiction presents to a writer challenges and problems that cannot be found in other
forms of fiction. In addition to all the usual problems of writing, science fiction stories must also
have strong and believable scientific or technical backgrounds. Isaac Asimov often declared that
writing science fiction was more difficult than any other kind of writing. He should have known;
he wrote everything from mysteries to learned tomes on the Bible and Shakespeare. If you can
handle science fiction skillfully, chances are you will be able to write other types of fiction or
nonfiction with ease.
3. Science fiction is the field in which I have done most of my work, both as a writer and an
editor. Although most of my novels are written for the general audience, since they almost always
deal with scientists and high technology they are usually marketed under the SF category. My
eleven years as a magazine editor
at Analog
and
Omni
were strictly within the science fiction field,
and I won six Science Fiction Achievement Awards (called the Hugo) for Best Professional
Editor during that time.
THE LITERATURE OF IDEAS
Science fiction has become known as “the literature of ideas,” so much so that some critics have
disparagingly pointed out that many SF stories have The Idea as their hero, with very little else to
recommend them. Ideas are important in science fiction. They are a necessary ingredient of any
good SF tale. But the ideas themselves should not be the be-all and end-all of every story. (Ideas
and idea-generation are discussed in chapter nineteen.)
Very often
it
is the idea content of good science fiction that attracts new writers to this
exciting yet demanding field. (And please note that new writers are not necessarily youngsters;
many men and women turn to writing fiction after establishing successful careers in other fields.)
Science fiction’s sense of wonder attracts new writers. And why not? Look at the playground
they have for themselves! There’s the entire universe of stars and galaxies, and all of the past,
present, and future to write about. Science fiction stories can be set anywhere and anytime.
There’s interstellar flight, time travel, immortality, genetic engineering, nanotechnology,
behavior control, telepathy and other types of extrasensory perception (ESP), colonies in space,
new technologies, explorations of the vast cosmos or the inner landscapes of the mind.
John W. Campbell, most influential of all science fiction editors, fondly compared science
fiction to other forms of literature in this way: He would spread his arms wide (and he had long
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