Archive for the ‘The Craft of Writing’ Category

Narrative Worlds Season 2 Debuts 11/21!

We’re pleased to announce that the second season of Narrative Worlds will debut on Sunday, November 21, at 1:00pm Pacific Time!  Part of the ongoing 2021 Nebula Conference Online, this worldbuilding webinar series is hosted by best-selling author and SFWA member Kate Elliott. Her guest for the first episode of Season 2 will be award-winning […]

SFF Writing for White Goblins: Decolonising your Defaults

by Nick Wood (NW) & Isiah Lavender III (IL) After finishing a working stint as a psychologist in Aotearoa, New Zealand, I (NW) visited the signing site for the Treaty of Waitangi (1840). This was a bilateral treaty between the colonising British Empire and the tangata whenua (or “People of the Land”, a.k.a. “Maori”), signed […]

Think Like a Horror Writer to Create Better Villains

by Michael J. Moore You write speculative fiction for the same reason you’ve read or watched it your entire life. There’s something inside of you that craves tales of relatable characters overcoming adversity. It’s your inner hero, and it manifests on that illuminated screen when you sit alone, clicking away on the keyboard. That something […]

Unusual Governments to Take Inspiration From

by Eleanor Konik   Often, speculative fiction relies on common government types, like monarchies and republics, because they’re familiar to readers. History, however, offers other examples of sociopolitical systems. They can be a gold mine for worldbuilding ideas that stretch beyond the mainstream. Informal Governments Many societies worked just fine without strict hierarchical leadership. Power […]

Cyberpunk: Writing for Tomorrow

by Naomi Norbez With the release of Cyberpunk 2077 a few months back, there has been some debate about what it means to be cyberpunk, and how that genre should be executed. As someone making a response game called Eyewear Cleaner 2077, I thought I’d throw in my two cents. In a world of free data […]

Using Comic Scripts to Outline Your Fiction

by J.D. Harlock Sometimes, outlining is a never-ending struggle. Too much? Too little? You can never really tell until you finally start writing that first draft. That may seem like a stretch, but keep in mind that for a good many writers, the outlining process stretches way past the planning stages and well into the […]

Using Unreliable Narration to Create Voice

by Priya Chand   All narrators are unreliable. If you’re reading this thinking “hey, you’re misusing the term; ‘unreliable narrator’ refers to a specific convention”–well, I’m narrating this post, so what follows is all my interpretation! I do, though, genuinely mean to say that all narrators sell readers on a specific version of events and […]

Bisexual+ Characters Do Not Equal Threesomes

by C.K. Larsen   Surely, nothing screams sexy like a bisexual+ woman asking, “How does it feel to kill someone?” Cue the eye roll. Sharon Stone’s persona in Basic Instinct depicts an openly bisexual+ character who is revealed as a violent, sex-craving psychopath, and is just one of the many cases of harmful tropes that […]

Writing Through the Terrible Twos

by Noah K. Sturdevant   It seems fair to say that authors are constantly scrambling for time to write. I previously wrote about managing this with a baby, and I thought I had things covered. Now I have a two year old.  Who knew that a person lacking reason and driven by impulse and the […]

Diversity Plus: Diverse Story Forms and Themes, Not Just Diverse Faces

by Henry Lien (This article originally appeared in The SFWA Bulletin #215.)   Something I’ve noticed repeatedly in my author appearances, conference panels, and lectures is that discussions about representation and diversity in the arts today focus on the importance of diverse characters and creators. As crucial as that is, diversity can and should also include […]