How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card

Card, Orson Scott. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. Cincinnati, OH: Writers Digest Books, 1990.

Accomplished speculative fiction author Orson Scott Card focuses this manual on the particulars of writing science fiction and fantasy stories. It contains advice that may be useful to writers of any kind of fiction.

To start, Card tries to define the realm of science fiction and fantasy. This is difficult. Once identified as a writer of speculative fiction, you may find it difficult to get your books marketed in any other category. On the up side, within the realm of science fiction of fantasy, you can write almost any kind of story. Science fiction and fantasy is defined by a mix of marketing, reader expectation and what writers produce; something readers of these books will have a feel for, but as a new writer, or someone new to the field, its useful to know what is expected.

Something unique to speculative fiction that Card gives much attention is world creation. All fiction creates a world of sorts, but a characteristic of speculative fiction is that the world of the story is significantly different from the world we live in. A writer of science fiction or fantasy stories must have a well thought out vision for his world and how it works; he need an understanding larger than what is minimally necessary for the story. This chapter contains practical advice on what works and doesn’t in world creation.

Something that sticks out to me is found in the chapter on story construction. Card writes about where a story should begin and end, depending on what kind of story it is: milieu, idea, character or event. All stories have all of these elements to some degree, but most focus on one. By understanding what kind of story you’re trying to write, you can know where to begin and end your story and how to set up and meet reader expectations. Reading this chapter I thought of several short stories and novels that I thought were very good and saw how they fit in these categories and how the authors made fitting decisions about where they started and stopped their stories.



Card’s advice on story construction is applicable to any kind of fiction. He draws examples from speculative fiction, and has writers of it in mind as his audience, but all kind of stories could be improved with this counsel.