A Sci-Fi Writer’s Manifesto
My spirit guide
Recently, a friend of mine urged writers to develop an ‘Artistic Life Purpose Statement’ and boldly offered her own. Now, I’ve done ‘the vision thing’ quite a lot in my time. I was once a manager in IBM and I’ve been a business consultant. Most ‘vision statements’ are a complete waste of time – platitudes, motherhood, and empty words to make corporate trolls feel good about themselves. So I look on the whole enterprise with a jaundiced eye.
Yet I’ve been having trouble with my writing lately. In the past few months, I’ve started and stopped three different novels. Each one got to about 20,000 words before I asked myself, is this really the novel I want to be writing? The answer in each case was ‘No.” It isn’t that they weren’t good stories, or in the wrong genre, or that I didn’t think they would be good, readable books. It’s something altogether more obscure and disturbing, a feeling that they’re taking me in the wrong direction, that there was a better book I could be writing.
So, taking my friend’s advice, I went on my own little vision quest. I live near the top of a mountain, so it was no problem to go out and climb to a high place, surrounded by massive granite boulders – house-sized if you can picture such massy presences – to find myself a spot where I could look out over wide vistas of rolling gum forest beneath bottomless, blue skies, and just sit and think.
What I came up with wasn’t really a vision, or, indeed, a statement of purpose. It was more a manifesto, a short set of statements of belief that I would like to guide my future work as a science fiction writer. So, without further ado, here is my sci-fi writer’s manifesto.
- Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.
- Be honest about what is real and what is not real.
- Do not write if you have nothing important to say.
- Write in a clear, simple style, so as to be understood.
- Look forward and outward from where we are to where we might one day be.
I think these five statements are all I need to write good science fiction that is worth writing. Soon I will write an exegisis to provide more detail about what each statement means to me.
(Note from the future: This was done and the links above will take you to each statement’s expansion.)
Wow. That’s a very serious list for a creative person. What bothers me most is number 3: “do not write if you have nothing important to say.”
The reason it bothers me is that I could see it as an excuse not to write. How many times have we as writers sat down and just written for the joy of exploring an idea? Not with any goal in mind, not with any intent to educate or elucidate, but simply to discover?
What if Picasso had stuck to the classic style, and never explored abstract art? He created something wild with the intent to discover, and then explored that new world, and in doing so created a whole new way of painting.
Writers need to be free to explore, without the need to produce something “valid” or “worthwhile”. The creative mind should work without boundaries, without expectations.
If you don’t write it, how do you know whether it’s important or not?
Hi Merrilee, sorry it took me so long to approve this comment – I’ve had some serious computer grief lately and have just had to install a new one!
You’re right, writers need as few barriers to writing as possible. However, when it comes to me myself personally, I only want to write stories that say something, that explore ideas, that offer well-thought-out opinions. I read so much stuff that leaves me thinking “Why did they bother?” and I don’t ever want a reader of mine having that thought. So much ‘genre’ work (including ‘literature’) is like that – grinding through a formula or frothing out overblown metaphors for no obvious reason other than entertainment of the lowest-common-denominator kind.
I’m a sci-fi writer for the same reason I believe writers should say something worth saying. It is a genre which explores and delves and lays bare. At its best, it is sublime. Writers like J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Ray Bradbury Ursula le Guinn and others are examples of what I mean. Today, such writers seem thin on the ground. Gene Wolfe is an exception that springs to mind (along with ‘literary’ writers like Gore Vidal and Margaret Atwood when they write sci-fi.)
At its worst, sci-fi is as guilty as all the other genres. (God knows there are some awful offerings out there in the space opera, cyberpunk, and steampunk sub-genres.) But, while fantasy, and chick lit, and crime, and so on might throw up a book that says something important once in a blue moon, sci-fi is where it happens regularly – or it should be.
Other writers can keep on saying nothing and writing fun thrillers or romances that mean nothing (and selling in the millions!) but I can’t do that. I need to think that what I’m doing isn’t just ephemeral entertainment.
Fair enough. As long as the need/desire to produce something worthwhile doesn’t stifle the creative process! It would for me; I would be so super-critical if I felt that everything I wrote had to be worthy.