Ben Bova - The Craft of Writing Sci-Fi.pdf

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19033010.002.png 19033010.003.png
 
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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.
?l 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.
?áErnest 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,
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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?I or never
knew?Ûthe 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?t 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.
?áIsaac A,simov
 

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