For a number of years, I have been concerned at the predictability of writing in SF and Fantasy. Typically, after the first few pages you feel you already know how the story will develop and end. This issue is entrenched in the thinking of the agent-publisher model and there are no easy fixes. New Wave SF in the 60s and 70s, despite its excesses, was an early attempt to fix this. The problem was: the resulting deconstructed form took precedence over content i.e. it rarely actually wrote about anything. Four decades on, much in the genre is still deeply unsatisfactory. The formulaic is a comfort zone. Who knows what a publisher might discover if he / she stepped outside?
My answer is a sketch, with, as a nod to literary theory, realism. Guide is a series of interlocking sketches. Since completing it I have worked on the form. Subsequent sketches have multiple storylines: there for the purpose of plot structure, characterisation and world creation. Each sketch contains the seeds of its own resolution – however these aren’t spelt out – and in fact, elements of the story may be obfuscated during editing. Those I’ve done come to around 20k words (novellete-novella sized). These are:
- Lucky (SF)
- Lory Gato, Interstellar Gourmet (SF)
- Brant (Fantasy)
Lucky is also on Kindle and it is free to download on:
01/03/2015
31/03/2015
01/04/2015
30/04/2015
01/05/2015
In due course I will ‘finish’ them. In the meantime I’m developing more.
A Guide to First Contact 