Description: The Challenge of Writing Science Fiction and FantasyThe 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 writer''s vocation, you''re 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 you''re interested in writing science fiction or fantasy.But don''t consider the advice we offer as the last word or the only word. Science fiction and fantasy can be, and should be, highly individual expressions of universal experience. Our self-expression will not be yours. We have strong opinions about what makes good or bad SF, spellbinding fantasy, or plain old misspelled garbage. Your opinions will surely differ from ours. But if rejecting our views at least helps you articulate your own more clearly, then this book is doing its job.Here''s the job we 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.We 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.Still, the excitement of novelty 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 us 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 they''re like kids quarreling over whether Boston Pizza is better than Domino''s, 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 don''t 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 we''re 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 they''ve read. What you learn from such reading will serve you well even if you''re determined to build a career as a literary "sharecropper," writing formula fiction based on someone else''s 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 we''re 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!It''s also why this book often uses clich characters and situations to illustrate technical ideas about scene construction, dialogue, and outlining. Chances are you''ll instantly recognize Thewbold the Barbarian and Lieutenant Chang of the Starmarines, and they won''t distract you from the concept we''re trying to explain. If they seem to you to be poking fun at genres you really love, just remember that satire usually attacks what we love but what also drives us crazy. And we have to confess that some of the hokiest, corniest genres are among our guilty pleasures.The American poet Ezra Pound once said: "Literature is news that stays news." If your story really touches on the universal -- what always happens, to everyone, everywhere -- it will stay news too. People will read your science fiction when your science is obsolete, and your fantasy when real dragons are hatching in high school science projects.And some of them, when they read your work, will dream of writing too.

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