Introduction to Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

Introduction to Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

“You have come to the end of this course. I sincerely hope that the things you’ve learned during the course have inspired you to create a world and start thinking about stories in it. I hope you are eager to start trying your hand at everything we talked about. Let me show you the different stages of your process I would like to see. Remember that when writing stories these stages might as well come at different times or they feed off each other in a constant loop. Find the Idea: The first thing is to find an idea. Something that captures your imagination and that makes you want to spend many hours thinking about it. The idea is probably a set of many that come from varied places like movies, books or just observations during walks around your neighborhood. If you haven’t done so yet, start collecting and keeping track of your ideas without judging them. Write lists, journal, do some of the exercises we’ve talked about, the idea is that you create a bank of ideas big enough for yourself that you never run out.

Build a New World: Take some of these ideas and decide if you are going to build a world that is very different (maybe a whole secondary world) or a little different from your own. Depending on what you decide you might use one of the two methods we talked about to worldbuild: top-down or bottom-up. Remember to integrate the science fiction or magical elements you’ve chosen into the world as much as possible, and to keep track of how the changes branch out into the bigger world. Find a Story in the World and Start Writing: This step might happen naturally while you are worldbuilding or you might have to go hunting for the stories. In the case of the latter, I encourage you to use an idea cloud to figure out where the potential stories in your world are lurking. If you have a story in mind, you can start structuring and thinking about the point of view you're going to use. Try to keep in mind that the first draft doesn’t need to be perfect, on the contrary, its only goal is to exist so you can work on it further. This means after the first draft is done, you can go over again and fix things when you are editing. Now, you can share your final project with us by clicking on the “Create your project”. Remember to share your final story as well as the steps you took in the process. Maybe you can post your idea cloud or the map of your world alongside it. The more you show me, the more feedback I can give you. Please include a short text with your images sharing with us how the idea came up and how it was the path to your project. If you want to share this project with the world by posting sections or quotes of your story on your blog or on social media don’t forget to use the hashtag #AndreaChapelaDomestika. As you can see, there are endless stories to be found around us and you too can start developing the tools to gather them and shape them. If you have any questions, I’ll be coming to the forum from time to time to answer them. I also encourage you to interact with other participants and start your own writing community. Surrounding yourself with people with the same interests that you have can be even truly rewarding and can help you get further. Being able to transform what we love into stories of our own is a great gift and it is something that anyone can learn. I can’t wait to see what you come up with! See you soon! ”

Partial transcription of the video

“Final Project Now it's really the end. We have come to the last video. Thank you for taking this course and allowing me to show you what I've learned in my learned journey. I hope the tricks and tools I've shown you are useful for you and that you feel inspired to create your own world and stories in it. Let me do a quick overview of what we learned so that you can keep in mind the most important aspects of the course. First, we talked about where ideas come from and how you can get to know your own attention and process to help you write. From there, we decided to explore how to build a wo...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Introduction to Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

• Level: Beginner
• 98% positive reviews (523)
• 25326 students
• 5 units
• 19 lessons (3h 44m)
• 2 downloads

• Category

  Writing

• Areas

  Creative Writing, Fiction Writing, Narrative, Storytelling, Writing