World Building for Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction
This week we looked at science fiction and speculative fiction writing, not just as style, but as ways of freeing up your creative process. The overall goal was world building, but the two main points that we explored this week are as follows:
Science fiction is about ideas and “What If?” questions.
Science fiction allows you to free yourself from the “need to be right” when creating your stories, characters, and settings.
This type of writing can apply to any genre you write in. We’ve probably seen many examples from film (Back the Future 2) and television (Black Mirror), but these techniques will also apply to Fiction (see this excerpt from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles); Poetry (see Sarah Lindsay’s Valhalla Burn Unit on the Moon Callisto); and even writing for the stage.
The Language of Science Fiction Science fiction is often concerned with the future, and as such, writers are given free reign to create worlds as extensions of our own. This gives us the chance to speculate on the future of familiar biological, social, technological, and psychological circumstances.
Exercise 1: Re-imagine the Familiar
List a series of common, everyday objects or systems. Even ones in your immediate surroundings.
Pick two or three from your list and speculate on how they will be different 50 years from today.
Will they be made of different materials? Will how we use them change? Will they be as common? Obsolete? Will they have a different use?
This is often the first step in creating new worlds for our readers. Think about how the ‘everyday’ becomes new in science fiction/fantasy: the toy top in Inception, the notion of school in the Harry Potter series, romantic love in The Shape of Water.
From this initial exercise, we can start filling in the world around the objects and systems you re-imagined by evoking the entire sensory experience around the object itself. Here’s that exercise.
Exercise 2: Sci-Fi & Fantasy World Building (Outline)
Using Exercise 1 as a springboard, use the Five Senses to make familiar things strange in your futuristic world. There are no wrong answers. Science fiction is often used synonymously with the term Speculative Fiction as the writer is speculating on a future. Release the need to be “right”
What Year is it? ____________________________
Where are we? _______________________________
What do you see?
the buildings, the sky, the modes of transportation. Is there vegetation? Are there animals? Who lives here and what do they look like? Do you know why the world is the way it is? (note: you don’t need to.)
What do you hear?
the sounds/silences of traffic, the sounds/silences of the landscape, the voices of residents (if any), the sounds/silences of technology
What materials do you feel?
what are the buildings made of? What are the streets made of? What materials are used for clothing? Does your world contain human-made elements or is it more nature-based?
What do you smell/taste?
what does the air smell like? Is it good? Bad? What other smells are present based on your answers above? What is the source of the air quality?
Bringing it Together: In a descriptive paragraph. bring the answers to your questionnaire above together to introduce us to the sensory experience of this brave new world. Feel free to share your paragraph in the comments!
For more, check out this fantastic slide presentation. Use the comments section below to share your writing!