Twelve techniques for SF and Fantasy writers

Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

Science fiction and fantasy seem unlikely partners. SF, after all, is about what could happen, given what we currently know about the universe. Fantasy is about what could never happen, because science has shown it to be impossible.

But science itself uses fantasy to make its points, and fantasy tries to work out its own implications in a consistent manner. Science imagines elevators that fall forever, and spaceships that display clocks running slower and slower as the ships near the speed of light. Fantasy imagines the logical consequences of a spell, and the ecological niche of dragons. These are all ‘thought experiments’, ways of using fantasy to look at the world and ourselves outside the limits of ordinary experience.

Whether you write SF or fantasy, you are conducting such a thought experiment: could a human love a robot, and could the robot requite that love? If magic worked, what would it cost? In both genres, you are really exploring the human mind under conditions that reveal something new – or something old, familiar and ingrained that we have taken for granted until you make us look at it again. Just as some rocks and flowers reveal unexpected colours under ultraviolet light, human nature looks different in the light of a distant star, or of a sorcerer’s glowing staff.

In this chapter I want to throw some light on the similarities of the two genres as well as their differences. This will involve their history, their conventions, and their future. But mine is just one writer’s view; I hope that your own vision of your genre will be far more imaginative and original than mine.

Origins of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Fantasy arises from myth, folk tale, and fairy story. It began as an effort to personify the mysterious forces that rule our world: lightning, rain, sunlight, ice, and earthquake. Sometimes those forces were seen as gods, or as ‘little people’, or as supernatural beings inhabiting trees or rivers. Obviously this view of the world is psychologically satisfying: the gods make us in their image, and we return the compliment.

SF’s ancestry is almost as old, but distinctively more upper-class. It stems from ‘Menippean satire’, also called ‘anatomy’, which was written by scholars who enjoyed poking fun at one another. Fantasy personalises natural forces and human traits; anatomy personalises abstractions. The Canadian literary scholar Northrop Frye calls anatomy a vision of the world in the light of a single idea. Both genres, as we’ll see, share a fascination with language.

Both genres also eventually crossbred with heroic romance, itself a descendant of myths about gods and their half-human, half-divine offspring. Folk tale offered simple advice (don’t talk to wolves you meet on your way to grandma’s), and anatomy parodied scholarship (here are the customs of the Utopians). But heroic romance actually turned both genres into narratives, stories that illustrated, glorified, or criticised a society’s values. This evolution occurred relatively recently. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is largely anatomy, but Gulliver is a typical quest hero out of romance. In fact, he is an ironic antihero, a variation on Don Quixote. Before we consider the modern genres, and where we might take them, we should look at some of their ancestral elements. They may still appear in your work, consciously or not, and you should be aware of them. Anatomy, for one, has several elements that have persisted since More’s Utopia in the sixteenth century: An isolated society

A society which is distant from us in time or space. It may be an island (Utopia, Lilliput, Airstrip One), or in the future (The Time Machine), or in a self-contained spaceship like the Enterprise in Star Trek. A morally significant language Orwell’s Newspeak is a superb example, but so are Tolkien’s languages and the Utopians’ Greco-Latin patois... which implies that even a pagan society could do much better than

Christians have done. An inquisitive outsider The outsider stands in for us; he or she has to learn what the society’s people all know from childhood. So Gulliver learns about Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and Genly Ai, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, learns about the strange world called

Winter. The importance of documents Orwell gives us The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which describes the world of Oceania. The Lord of the Rings claims to be based on various written sources, and Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle keeps returning to the Book of Bokonon, a religious text.

A ‘rational’ or ideological attitude toward sex In Zamyatin’s novel We (which influenced both Huxley and Orwell), any citizen can claim the sexual services of any other citizen. In Utopia, those engaged to be married can see each other naked before the ceremony, so they know what they’re getting. In The Left Hand of Darkness, people change gender every month, more or less at random. Fantasy has borrowed many of these elements, and its own elements show its descent from myth – which is about gods, beings who are superior to humans in every way. Frye argues that myth evolves into romance, whose characters are superhuman but not divine. So while anatomy shows people in conflict with their own minds (they know less than they think they do), fantasy shows people in conflict with enormously powerful beings.

The hero’s quest

In western literature, myth is about tyrant fathers overthrown by rebel sons, and about the uneasy relations between gods and humans. Events are fated, but not always as we might suppose. Humans (including those with divine ancestors) can sometimes use magic as a kind of godlike power. So fantasy tends to deal with people, usually young, in conflict with enormously powerful beings who play a kind of parental or elder role: giants, dragons, sorcerers, witches, and even Tolkien’s Ents. From heroic romance, fantasy borrows the great themes of the quest and the social redeemer. Just as Zeus and Jesus escape the murderous intent of ruling father figures, the quest hero survives childhood and survives to overthrow the old order. The quest hero is the central figure of both science fiction and fantasy, so it is worth revisiting that hero’s life stages: • an unusual birth, with a prophecy of a great future

• menace from the father-figure, who tries to subvert the prophecy by killing the child

• pastoral childhood, with the hero growing up in seclusion among simple rustics, close to nature

• early signs of the hero’s special qualities

• departure from the ‘paradise’ of childhood on a quest; the hero leaves reluctantly, and often only after three challenges

• the quest itself, often with companions; the events of the quest are a sequential test of the hero’s skills and character

• the confrontation, when the hero faces a major struggle with the evil adversary, armed with whatever skills and values he has demonstrated on the quest

• the hero’s death, real or symbolic; in the latter case, a journey underground is a metaphor for death

• the return to life, and the hero’s triumph and recognition as a social saviour; like his death, his resurrection may be merely symbolic, with a new society forming around the memory and achievements of the lost hero.

I have not bothered to give examples, because you can supply them from your own reading. With countless variations, this is the basic plot of science fiction and fantasy. Implicit in the plot is the basic theme of both genres: power. What is it, who holds it, who should hold it, and with what results?

Science fiction and fantasy enable us to imagine power as a fulfilment of our deepest desires and dreams, or as the nightmarish destruction of those desires. Like gamblers who hope to win the one big pot, to buy the winning lottery ticket, we keep returning to science fiction and fantasy to help us visualise the quest for power and its achievement[D1].

The writer’s challenge

As a new writer of science fiction or fantasy, you are like a quest hero rusticating in Arcadia: you read of great deeds being done long ago, in galaxies far away, and you dream of doing some yourself. In some ways you have opportunities undreamed-of a generation ago. Readerships are large, and publishers must crank out more titles every month. But these advantages have their drawbacks. Most readers, unfortunately, tend to like the same kind of story, over and over again. Write such a story and editors will reject you as too derivative. Try for originality, and they’ll reject you as too far out for their readers. You are working as a craftsperson, even as an artist, but what you create is essentially a raw resource for an industry that tries to satisfy a market.

I recommend that you go for originality. Science fiction and fantasy are now compartmentalized into subgenres: alternate history, military SF, epic fantasy, urban fantasy, and so on. Every one of those subgenres resulted from some author breaking into new territory. Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers launched military SF. Tolkien created epic fantasy with The Lord of the Rings. In the past half-century, no imitator has surpassed the originals. In effect, as such authors open our eyes to a new genre, they close the door to followers.

Those followers form two tribes: the worshipful plagiarists, who change only names and details, and the parodists who put an ironic spin on their versions of old stories. Irony is often useful in science fiction and fantasy, but only when it is useful to you and your story– not when it simply reports your own dislike for some bogus classic.

The blended future of Science Fiction and Fantasy

I believe the two genres share a future that could take them in alternate directions. One is what I call ‘bottom-line’ fiction, where the focus (whether in SF or fantasy) is on the economy and technology of your imagined world. Walter Jon Williams has pointed the way to this in his fantasy novel Metropolitan, where a planet-covering city is run by ‘plasm’, a kind of supernatural source of energy. We still need science-fiction novels about the future

economies that can make starships financially attractive projects, likely to return a profit to their investors. I would also love to read a novel about a US president in 2061 who has to talk the taxpayers into terraforming Mars for the sake of thirty-first-century America. The other direction is what I call ‘mythotropic’: we assume that science (or magic) has made economics irrelevant, and the people in our worlds are free to act out their own psychological desires in any way they choose. I tried to do this in my novel Gryphon, where interstellar contact with advanced civilisations has meant the reduction of humanity to a few million extremely powerful individuals; everyone else was killed in wars using alien technology. The survivors are not always very nice people, but they are free to do anything they like. So you might consider stories involving political intrigue over funding a new stardrive, or the stormy romance of two godlike individuals who quarrel by flinging asteroids at one another.

However original you are, of course, you are still working within the conventions; originality means finding something new in what seems to be an exhausted genre. Can you tell a new story about time travel? A new kind of military SF story? Do it! Ernest Hemingway said that all American literature comes from one novel, Huckleberry Finn – because that novel established American vernacular speech as a literary language as expressive and powerful as any. In the same sense, all modern fantasy comes from The Lord of the Rings, which synthesised a range of literary styles and conventions into a form never

seen before. If fantasy is your genre, then you should regard The Lord of the Rings as mainstream writers regard James Joyce’s Ulysses: a must-read that it is pointless to imitate. Introduce elves or dwarves or magic objects into your story, and you waste all your efforts and imagination. (The same is of course true of the Harry Potter books, which must have made many readers try their hands at writing Potteresque fantasy.)

If you must take something from Tolkien or Rowling, let it be inspiration – that you too can write a magnificent book, original and ambitious, in this genre. It may have a quest; it may rely, like anatomy, on strange languages and obscure documents. But it will still have something new and exciting to say.

Research and soul search

Where do you get your ideas? In a word, everywhere – except science fiction and fantasy. Of course you’ll read in your preferred genre, but authors in either genre should be polymaths, reading both broadly and narrowly in history, anthropology, the sciences, politics, the arts, and everything else. You should be reading journals of archaeology and psychology, not to mention popular magazines like Discover, New Scientist, and Scientific American (this applies to fantasy writers also). You’ll discover that scientists are often very imaginative, but they don’t, and won’t, take the three extra steps you can take with their findings and speculations.

Think also about the stereotypical thinking behind many stories, like the barbarian nomads besieging the civilised world. It’s fun for the Conan fans, but go back to the history those stereotypes are based on. Genghis Khan, for example, was a politically advanced leader who created the concept of diplomatic immunity, built a meritocratic social system to replace the old Mongol aristocracy, recruited scholars to staff his empire, promoted free trade, and decreed absolute freedom of worship within his realm. So perhaps the barbarians in your fantasy world could be the progressives, battling to transform a decayed civilisation. You should consider the history and cultures of non-European societies: Arab, African, Asian, Polynesian, Native American. What are their political systems like? How does magic work in the Bolivian Andes, or among Montreal’s Haitians? Would a Jordanian community on the moon be different from one in suburban Amman? What would a Vietnamese space station sound like and smell like? That’s the research part of your writing. The soul search is just as important. You should brainstorm with friends (especially those who share your taste in fiction), kicking around ideas that you love or hate in other writers’ work. (Doing this over coffee with a friend one morning, I came up with an idea that turned into a radio drama produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – a very good return on the price of a pot of coffee.) The key to such brainstorming is to avoid being negative. Instead of saying, ‘No,’ participants should say: ‘Yeah, or...’ and ‘Yes, and how about...’ That’s how the creativity keeps flowing.

You can even brainstorm by yourself. Start with the kind of letter that you’d send to an editor, pitching your story – but you’re writing this letter to yourself. It will force you to create details about the story and its characters, and about how it differs from earlier treatments of the same idea. Before you know it, you’ll have at least a rough outline of your story, and quite a few details about your characters. I have written such letters to myself for almost all my novels, and I still marvel at how well they help to clarify my thoughts about a story.

But don’t stop there! Start keeping a journal or diary about your story. It’s not just a place to record how many words you’ve done today, but also a place to do some hard thinking about the story’s strengths and weaknesses. Chances are you’ve gone many pages into a story and then run out of steam. Something’s wrong with the story, but you can’t be more specific than to say, ‘This is awful’. The story goes in a drawer, or stays unprinted on your hard drive, and you repeat the same sorry process with the next story.

But if you let your ‘inner editor’ criticise the story in progress, you’ll be amazed at the results. As soon as you start writing, ‘This is awful because...’ the reasons for the story problems become clear. As you’re stating those problems in clear, complete sentences, the solutions come to you, sometimes faster than you can type them down. You see where the plot needs patching, or the heroine’s character needs sharpening, or the dialogue could convey more than mere exposition. This kind of ‘metawriting’ can also help you put ideas together. A starfaring society must have more gadgets than just big rockets or warp drives. What other advances has it made, and what consequences have resulted? Suppose, for example, that we can simply teleport from Earth to other planets. No one bothers to use spacecraft any more, so interstellar space has been abandoned. Just as people still sail solo around the world when they could book airline flights, your characters might deliberately choose spaceflight as a form of recreation. One such hobbyist-astronaut might then discover something unexpected out there between the stars.

Your sorcerers’ empire has a long history, even if your novel deals with only the three weeks before its cataclysmic collapse. What’s happened in the past century or two that could influence your characters and their destinies? (You don’t have to go to the lengths that Tolkien did, but even a few paragraphs about your world’s history may give you still more ideas.)

What if and what’s more

In other words, your story is not just ‘what if?’ It’s ‘what if, and what’s more!’ You are trying to evoke a world that is plausibly, vividly different from ours in at least a couple of important ways. Your interstellar empire is not just the nineteenth-century British empire with starships, but an empire of its own kind, with its own problems and successes, with people who may or may not like the empire they live in.

Even some of the Golden Age greats could miss the ‘what’s more’ details. In ‘Delilah and the Spacerigger’, Robert A. Heinlein examines the problems of a construction foreman on a space station when a female worker shows up. Heinlein pokes some rather advanced women’s-lib fun at the outraged foreman. But it would have been a better story – a better science-fiction story – if he’d taken female astronauts for granted, and the conflict had arisen from something less obvious: What if a woman helped build the first space station... and what’s more, she was black, or lesbian, or a better engineer than the foreman? Anyone can predict the automobile, old SF writers used to say. The trick is predicting traffic jams and making out in the back seat. That’s the ‘what’s more’. This puts you in an interesting predicament. Stick to ‘what if’, and your story is dull and predictable. Explore ‘what if and what’s more’, and you find yourself satirising your genre’s basic theme – power and its proper use.

For example, you may portray humans who are starfaring immortals, or ancient wizards, but they will still suffer from at least some of our own follies and vices. They may deal with a better class of problem than we do, but we can identify with the challenges they face. Otherwise, how would we understand them? When you consider ‘what if and what’s more’, don’t forget your critical element: the implications of some aspect of science, or the function of magic. Both grant us a power over the material world, but it’s a power that reflects our own psychology. So whether we’re dealing with a world where magic works, or an earthlike world orbiting a gas giant, it’s a world that reflects our fears and desires, and even personifies them.

Satire and irony are often present (hobbits, for example, are ironic treatments of standard quest heroes). But the science or magic really serves by helping to dramatise our personal struggles with love, sex, death, and social relationships.

Satire and superpowers

So on one hand you are portraying people with ‘superpowers’, people who fulfil our own desires to know more and do more. At the same time, you’re showing those people forced to fall back on the same resources we have: courage, patience, intelligence, loyalty, and so on.Satire implies irony, and in irony the reader knows more about your characters than thecharacters themselves do. In fact, the great target of Menippean satire is the educated ignoramus,the wizard without wisdom. A crude version of this character is the mad scientist ofthe comic books. A more sophisticated version is Saruman, the wizard who rationalises his alliance with Sauron. Dr Strangelove is another example, inspired by the much less funny scientists who designed the first nuclear weapons and then developed plans for fighting suicidal wars with them.

The unwise wizard doesn’t have to be evil, and doesn’t even have to be a wizard. The villains in your SF or fantasy should never think of themselves as bad; they think of themselves as sadly misunderstood and hard done by. But they are also people who don’t care if they hurt others by exercising power. Saruman and Dr Strangelove alike think they’re being ‘realistic’ in pursuing their catastrophic policies. If people get hurt, well, it’s in the service of some higher good.

By contrast, your hero understands very well that misusing power can be disastrous. That’s why Gandalf and other characters in The Lord of the Rings are terrified of the One Ring, and Frodo’s near-failure to destroy it shows how right they are to be terrified. Bear in mind that the best satire is the least obvious. When we satirise, we invite our readers to look down on our characters from some moral height; we and our readers should be detached enough to see the absurdity of the characters’ actions and values, but close enough to recognise how much like ourselves they are. Imagine a photo of yourself that makes you look the way you want the world to see you... but also makes you look a little silly. That’s the effect the satirist wants to create in the reader.

Five modes of literature

Satire in science fiction and fantasy is a bit more complex, however. Northrop Frye argues that literature has five modes that reflect the power of the characters.

Myth

Myth is stories about gods who are superior to us in power and in kind. The Roman, Greek and Norse myths are all examples.

Romance

Romance describes superhumans who are superior to us in power, but are still recognizably human. Hercules and Achilles and Superman are such superhumans.

‘High mimetic’

This portrays aristocrats who are superior to us in social status but otherwise ordinary humans. (‘Mimetic’ means ‘imitating reality’; the ‘high’ refers to class.) Hamlet and Julius Caesar are high mimetic. ‘Low mimetic’ is about people whose power and knowledge are equal to our own. This includes most mainstream fiction, whose middle-class characters are a lot like us.

Irony

According to Frye, irony portrays characters who are inferior to us in knowledge or power. We know more than they do, or we have more freedom of action than they do. Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classic ironic character; we know him better than he knows himself, and we have more freedom. At least we hope we do! Satire makes us think again about ourselves and what we take for granted. You could read each mode of fiction as a satire on the one above it. A superhuman looks ironic compared to a real god; consider the fate of superhuman Icarus, who aspired to heaven and fell to his death. An aristocrat, for all his privileges, is a pretty sad excuse for a superhuman, and a middle-class hero imitating an aristocrat (like Leopold Bloom imitating Ulysses) is equally ironic. An ironic character like Winston Smith looks simply pathetic in his search for the kind of life we take for granted. So your hero may be a starfaring astronaut who reminds us of Ulysses, but the astronaut is likely to seem comparatively trivial compared to the larger-than-life Ulysses. I have discussed literary history and theory at considerable length because whatever you write will reflect everything you have read so far. If you had no idea what a quest hero is supposed to be, your stories would still have quest heroes – because all the stories you’ve read have had them, and your stories would subconsciously imitate what you’ve read. But if you consciously exploit literary theory, and you consciously know how the Greeks and Romans told stories, your stories will be far more effective.

Twelve techniques for SF and Fantasy writers

1. Don’t be in a hurry

Too many writers cram all the exposition into the first chapter. That’s like putting all your furniture just inside the front door. Even a short story has a lot of room, and a novel has even more. Give us background information when your readers need it – and in many cases they won’t need it at all. So if your story is set in Titanopolis, on Saturn’s largest moon, don’t feel you have to give us a potted history of the settling of Titan. Just establish the setting, maybe with a custom like no drinking until Saturn rises above the horizon. Much of the earlier material in your story will therefore be a bit confusing to your readers. That’s all right – they know you’ll get around to explaining things in good time. In the meantime, they’ll keep turning pages because they want to learn more about this weird world you’re giving them.

2. Make the setting a character

In a novel set in Cornwall, the author is saying that only in Cornwall could such a story happen. Cornish culture will affect the events and the outcome, and in the process we’ll learn about Cornwall as well as about how Cornish girls catch their boys. Similarly, something about Titanopolis and its residents will influence the outcome of your story. This is important, but exposition will only hurt matters. The culture of Titanopolis should emerge naturally as we watch its inhabitants go about their business. But your characters, especially if they’re visitors, may ‘naturally’ consult some tourist guide or history of Titanopolis.

3. Make the science or magic critical to the story

Spaceships and magic spells are important for more than simply taking us to the setting of the story. The science or spells should advance the story at every point, creating both obstacles and solutions. In my fantasy novels Greenmagic and Redmagic, I assumed that using magic would exhaust the magician, so after a big spell he would be useless for days or weeks. I also assumed that magic had to be spoken. So my hero had an advantage (he didn’t get tired after casting spells), but when he lost his voice by another sorcerer’s spell, he was crippled; he would have to deal with life using brains and muscle, like everyone else.

4. Make your characters insecure

When people do amazing things for stupid reasons, it’s melodrama. When they do amazing things for absolutely real reasons, it’s drama. So it’s not enough to have a brave hero or a hostile heroine. The hero should be scarred by some earlier failure to be brave, and the heroine should be nursing a broken heart. The talented young sorcerer wants to master magic to avenge his family, or to make life secure for his people. In other words, motivation is critical. Something awful has happened in every character’s life, in effect an expulsion from paradise. Now your characters are struggling in a harsh world, trying to regain paradise or to replace it with the Heavenly City. They will stop at nothing to achieve that goal. Here’s a way to get into a character’s soul: write a first-person account by that character, describing the worst thing that ever happened to them. It may not get into the story, but it will give you some surprising insights into the character. When I did this with the hero of the novel I’m now working on, I was astonished by his emotional flatness as he described the destruction of his company, his career, and his marriage. I realised he’s a very angry, very repressed man, so his anger may explode at some point in the story.

5. Make your characters concrete

This doesn’t mean description of hair colour or height or clothing. Instead, write a résumé for each of your major characters. But don’t include just education and job history. What about sexual orientation, personal relationships, family, social status, income, taste in furniture, anxieties, philosophy of life, attitude toward death? Again, you may not use all the data you come up with, but it’s often helpful – and it can give you ideas for how your character might develop.

6. Experiment with ‘periscope writing’

I do this when I’m starting a novel and want to learn more about its world. So I write a scene or two, just to find out what my viewpoint character sees as he or she moves around. It can be amazing to see how much detail pops out at you: not just Saturn rising above the horizon, but the smell of recycled air in the Titanopolis Bar & Grill. In effect, you’re letting your ‘inner writer’ take over for a while, creating images and problems that may be useful in the story itself.

7. Build your ‘back’ story

The story should begin at the moment when it becomes inevitable – when something happens to your protagonist that forces him or her out into a hostile world. But you should know what’s been going on in your characters’ lives for years or even decades before the start of the story. The Lord of the Rings takes place over a span of a few months, but the ‘back’ story covers thousands of years... and it affects the story again and again.

8. Foreshadow your ending

The opening scenes of your story should describe some kind of appropriate stress – for example, your hero is tested under fire and fails the test. This humiliation will motivate him to redeem himself, and the climax will echo the opening scene in some way. The opening scenes will also tell us what is at stake in this story: the hero’s self-esteem? The fate of the sorcerers’ empire? The survival of humanity against the alien onslaught? Whatever it is, we should care about the outcome.

9. Keep style consistent with the point of view

A blunt-spoken veteran warrior will notice almost everything around her, but she’ll think about it in short sentences with a simple vocabulary. A minstrel will pick up emotional moods that the warrior misses, and he’ll express his thoughts with more words (including quotes from appropriate songs and ballads). So when the minstrel is the POV character, you’ll write in a richer, more luxuriant style than when you’re showing us the world through the warrior’s eyes. If your point of view shifts regularly, your style should also shift. The veteran will view a sunrise in far different terms from the minstrel – and a vampire’s view of sunrise will be still more different. As the author you will sometimes have to tell us things that your characters can’t. Keep such interruptions as few and brief as possible, and avoid ‘fine writing’ – it will only distract readers from the story to you and your supposed talent.

10. Remember the moral importance of language

Tyrannical bureaucracies will use euphemisms: ‘Human resource reallocation’ could be a term for ‘exile to the Titan Penal Colony’. In A Clockwork Orange, written during the Cold War, the British thug Alex uses Russian slang – hinting at some unfortunate future Soviet influence over Britain. People from different cultures in a fantasy novel may use brief expressions in their own languages, which should sound like the cultures: Elvish is lovely and musical, while the Orcs’ language is harsh and rasping. You will find it very helpful to develop vocabularies in various languages; these will give you the basis for names of characters and places. Be careful, though, about using a real-world language in a fantasy-world setting. Your readers will find it jarring if familiar words and names pop up in a world where they shouldn’t. (I did this in my novels Greenmagic and Redmagic, but my premise was that ancient tribes on Earth had been mysteriously transported to a world where magic works... so one tribe spoke Proto-Indo-European and another spoke ancient Irish.)

11. Use symbols appropriately

Seasons, times of day, youth, age, weapons and tools, gardens and wildernesses – these all have symbolic resonance going back thousands of years. If you use them in some reversed form (a sword that kills but never liberates, for example), you are using them ironically. That’s fine, but know what you’re doing. When your sorceress-heroine is a little girl, she might consider her mother’s herb garden a wonderful place; when she must flee for her life and the garden is destroyed, you’ve got a traditional expulsion from Eden. A memory of a poisonous plant in that garden might later help the sorceress to triumph over her enemies. But if Eden nurtured poisonous plants, just how innocent and happy was it?

12. Keep your characters in constant trouble

Stress reveals character, but different challenges will reveal different aspects of that character. Each aspect is going to be needed to help get your characters from problem to problem, and finally to the climactic struggle. Until then, they live in either the frying pan or the fire. Even if you give your hero a chance to kick back and have a beer while en route to Titan, that peaceful moment should be a time for him to fret about how ill-prepared he is, how ferocious his enemies are, and how easily everything could go wrong. That in turn will show us that your hero is a worrier – and we’ll keep reading to see if that helps him anticipate trouble, or sink into indecision.

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