Archive for March, 2012
The Agreement Turnaround
Today at SpecTechnique I’ve got a short article about a neat little dialogue trick I like to call the agreement turnaround. One sure sign of limp dialogue in a story is when it follows a boring question-answer, question-answer, yes-that’s-very-interesting pattern. So to generate conflict and delight, I think it’s helpful to break up that flow whenever […]
Filed under: DIALOG | 1 Comment
Tags: dostoevsky, kathryn cramer, M John Harrison, Mary Gentle, new weird, sidney morgenbesser
One part of creating a secondary world is working out a culture for that world: its songs, stories, plot devices and cliches; its holy books and its vocabulary of affect; how it represents and celebrates and criticizes itself. One method of doing this is to build primary sources into your secondary world. I’m talking about […]
Filed under: WORLDBUILDING | 1 Comment
Tags: george gissing, ghost in the shell, roadside picnic, strugatsky, tolkien, voltaire, worldbuilding
What if every speculative invention & gimmick you wrote, also came packaged with a reasonable explanation as to why it was possible? If you’re a hard science fiction writer, this probably sounds like an immense blessing. Say goodbye to worrying how you can make the physics work out. It’s now easy to think up second-order […]
Filed under: CHARACTERIZATION, EXPOSITION | 8 Comments
Tags: a voyage to arcturus, alfred bester, ann beattie, david lindsay, edmund burke, eric jourdan, gay novels, kafka, moliere, poe
An observer might…
Happy Monday, dear SpecTechnique readers. One of the reasons I enjoy reading 19th century novels (just like I enjoy reading old-school SF like E.E. “Doc” Smith & A.E. Van Vogt) is that I like seeing devices that have now fallen out of fashion. Because after that, I can try out ways to make ‘em new […]
Filed under: EXPOSITION, VIEWPOINT, WRITING STYLE | Closed
Tags: Balzac, charlotte bronte, dostoevsky, M John Harrison, vampire hunter d
Unexpected Explanations
One of the most powerful ways to generate delight for your reader while writing SF/F, or maybe just writing period, is the device of the unexpected explanation. To do this, begin with an expected, ordinary line, followed by an explanation rooted in your SFnal milieu. In M. John Harrison’s brilliant Nova Swing, a character enters […]
Filed under: Uncategorized, WRITING STYLE | Closed
Tags: cyril m kornbluth, dostoevsky, frederik pohl, Gu Long, H.G. Wells, K J Bishop, M John Harrison, space merchants, Tolstoy
SpecTechnique 