A Story About A Story
In which I draft a short science fiction story
A funny thing happened while working on my science fiction novel. I saw a news item in my Astronomy feed that sparked a concept for an entirely new story. I decided to go for it, but this time I swore to myself that I would make sure that it remained a short story and not bloom into yet another long form writing project.
At first this was easy as the story has a rather simple concept at its' core. However I decided to include a prelude of sorts that played out on an alien world in a far-away cluster of galaxies at a point in time where the universe was far younger. In doing so I realized that I needed to do some serious world building. I accomplished that but then the dilemma was deciding exactly how much of that world building needed to actually appear in this short story.
Fortunately while catching up on my podcasts, I listened to an interview on Geek's Guide to the Galaxy that featured Warren Lapine who was touting a book he put together that featured a bunch of Roger Zelazny's essays about writing science fiction. I dropped everything and read the book. Luckily for me the answer to my dilemma was found in those pages. Zelazny recommending figuring out a lot about your alien worlds, for example, but then paring down the number of aspects of these worlds that actually make the cut and get used in your story.
Important note: You can find this podcast on YouTube, on the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy website or by using your favorite podcast app. Recommended! I obtained and read the ebook version of Warren Lapine’s book. Also recommended! The following image is used as a thumbnail for both the Youtube video and on the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy website.
Zelazny’s advice made perfect sense to me and helped me draw the line in my story. I didn't need to include every last detail that I figured out about my aliens after all. The world building effort let me include enough to make the aliens quite different from humans, but some of the cooler things were only alluded to tangentially if at all. I will leave it to my readers to fill in the blanks.
I finished up the story last night and printed it out. I will do a quick red line on the pages later today and then clean it up and submit it to my critique group for a read-through on Tuesday. This will be my first time receiving a critique from this group and I expect it to be brutal, but that’s OK. I expect to fail a lot before experiencing success with my writing. My main takeaway from this experience is that I can indeed finish drafting an original bit of science fiction. It will be interesting to see how long it takes from this point to reach a state where I think the story is actually complete and ready for an unsuspecting public.