What shall I write about?

Remember that scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Gestapo officer sits across from Marion and asks “What shall we talk about?”

That is the scene that comes to mind every time I sit down at my laptop and stare at a blank word document. I am exaggerating though as it really isn’t that bad. It isn’t hard to come up with ideas for stories. If I sit down to think about it I can usually come up with three or four random ones. The hard part is coming up with things that will keep first my interest while I write and then yours while you read it.

When I started my first writing course “The craft of Plot” I came up with a universe I could use as the setting for all my writing projects. It was a kind of sci-fi version of “Watership Down” with genetically modified animals living on a generational ship going through space. The main gist of the story idea was that the animals would not know that they were on a ship in space. One of the animals would eventually discover that they were on a ship piloted by an AI that could only stay running by having one of the animals act as the AI’s nervous system. The main protagonist’s (who would have been a rabbit of course) sister would have gone missing and eventually she would have been found as having been abducted by the AI to serve as its next brain. I might still write it though I think it would be better as a short story than a novel.

I moved on from that idea due to the fact that it really didn’t fit with the next few writing assignments I had. When I got into the next class “The Craft of Character,” I made a character with the same name as a character I had created in Eve online. Really only the name was the same but I got to know the character as I wrote various character building scenes and I decided to use it for my first novel. But where should my story take place and what should it be about? What it’s about is still a secret but I’ll let you know the genre.

The generic advice usually given to new writers is to write what you know, especially when it comes to genre novels. Writing about what you know content wise is kind of pointless these days. If you want to write about something nowadays, it’s easy enough to research it, which then makes you knowledgeable about it, which then allows you write about it. What I’ve found works best for me is to go with what keeps me interested and if it’s not something I know about at the time, I do a bit of research and then write about it.

Fortunately for me when it comes to genres what I know is what I enjoy writing about which is of course science fiction and fantasy. I am leaving fantasy aside for the moment as I will address that genre in another post. A well meaning teacher once told me as a kid that science fiction was stories about a future that could have a chance of happening. Ergo Star wars is not science fiction while Star Trek is. I am not sure that this well meaning teacher was right. Webster defines science fiction as “fiction dealing principally with the impact of actual or imagined science on society or individuals or having a scientific factor as an essential orienting component.”

A bit dry for a definition but you can see what it is getting at. According to this definition, just because a novel is set in the future does not make it science fiction unless science is actually involved in the story. Dean Koontz in his 1957 book “Writing popular fiction” outlined 8 plotlines for what he considered to be a science fiction novel:

1. If this goes on … story
2. Alien contact story
3. Time travel story
4. New discovery story
5. Scientific problem story
6. Altered past story
7. Alternate world story
8. Journey through a strange land story

Of course this list was made in 1957 and if the definition of science fiction still remains the same, I would put forth that there is a new type of plot line to be added to the list: Space opera. Space opera is defined as an adventure science-fiction story though I prefer the definition given by Hartwell and Cramer in their 2006 book “The Space Opera Renaissance”: colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes. In other words, it’s an adventure story that takes place in space. Of course nowadays you get lots of genre stories that take place in different settings and there is a lot of crossover between genres.

A mystery story set in space is still first and foremost a mystery story even if it could be called a sci-fi story. I suppose authors have their own definition of what genre their story is and then the publisher or bookstore comes along and gives it a new one.

Last week, I took a kind of test on one of the many writing websites I’ve been visiting. It asked me to enter my writing experience and interests, among other things, and it purported to tell me what kind of writing project I should be working on. After I did the test, I got the result back and it said I should be writing a short story. Well that is just too bad, because, I’m already three months into writing a novel and I’m not going to stop now.

My upcoming novel is a space opera novel, though I suppose it could be considered a journey through a strange land story if you consider every society is a strange land when you are unfamiliar with it.

If you aren’t into science fiction, don’t worry. This is not a science fiction blog. I’ll be talking about writing in general and particular and if my main work at the moment is a sci-fi novel and I make posts about certain aspects of writing one, I will be working on other projects as well and in the end what works for one genre of novel can work for another.