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Why write SF?

I have just finished the first draft of my story. It has taken over two months, is total crap and doesn’t make the point that I am trying to bring across. (Can you say that? —This just goes to show what I have to grapple with in my writing.)

The story needs a complete re-write and at least another month’s work before I can even submit it to critters.

So why write an SF story? At five cents a word, I might get thirty dollars for it. If I sell to Interzone perhaps 30 quid. Oh wait, IZ pays a little more for shorter stories, so perhaps 36 quid, if I end up fleshing it out a little. Wow. Even if I could sell a story every single day, it isn’t exactly a viable career move.

Have I mentioned that writing SF is a hundred times harder than travel writing? A travel narrative might form the background to a story. Then you have to people it with believable characters and create a captivating plot which has to revolve around an original idea, preferably founded on proper scientific theory.

Back in the fifties and sixties, when written SF was big, the fees paid for short stories were truly astounding, by which I mean they were the same as today but before 40-50 years of inflation eroded them. You could live a month on a single sale, depending on your drinking habits. But since then the genre has fallen on hard times. And this is not a line fed to writers by arrogant editors: unlike travel mags, many SF magazines fold for lack of subscriptions. Their circulation is, at best, tiny.

So why write SF stories? To experiment with an idea, to expand one’s horizons, for sure. Stories also stand up as entities in their own right. Like movies and singles, they are eligible for awards and the most memorable of them occasionally get snapped up for a screen-play, potentially opening up the doors to Hollywood.

Mine is not such a story.

So why write it? In my case it is about gaining experience. Unlike non-fiction and travel narratives, which I have written since I was a kid, I always wanted to write SF but never had the confidence to try. To break into the genre would be a dream come true. It would mean that, in a small way, I would join the heroes of my youth such as Heinlein, Clarke, Sturgeon, Pohl, Asimov and many others. I would have the potential to join my current heroes in contemporary SF. If I get my story into one of the prozines, it would be noticed in the field. That is real exposure. It would mean that I’d be limited only by my ability to keep the momentum going. And even if I can’t, I would have achieved one of my childhood dreams. I would be a science fiction writer. —And that is priceless.

So why write travel?

Beats me 😉

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2 Responses to “Why write SF?”

  1. Toby O'Neil Says:

    You’re braver than I am — my few attempts at writing fiction were almost uniformly disasterous. The gap between the vision in my head, and the words on the page was unbridgeable.
    It always read as overblown pretentious junk…

    Since my current writing is mathematical, my only difficulty (after doing the maths) is finding synonyms for `hence’.

    Good luck!

    Toby.

  2. Denni Says:

    Hi Toby, good to hear from you!

    My own (fiction) writing is also pretentious junk, it’s just a matter of practice and perspective 😉
    (I’m old and ugly enough now to brave the criticism).

    BTW, I am definitely an idiot because I got my figures wrong by an order of magnitude: a sale actually amounts to about 300 quid — which isn’t bad, actually.