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C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP\sf1.htm
To my sister Janice,
 
Who taught me how to read,
 
Which was the beginning of wisdom,
 
 And how to be charitable,
 
Which is wisdom's end.
 About the Author
No
one had ever won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel two years in a row-until 1987, when
Speaker for the Dead 
won the same awards given to
 Ender's Game.
But Orson Scott Card'sexperience is not limited to one genre or form of storytelling. A dozen of his plays have been produced inregional theatre; his historical novel,
Saints
(alias
Women of Destiny)
has been an underground hit for severalyears; and Card has written hundreds of audio plays and a dozen scripts for animated videoplays for the familymarket. He has also edited books, magazines, and anthologies; he writes a regular review column for
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction;
he publishes
Short Form,
a journal of short-fiction criticism; he evenreviews computer games for
Compute!
Along the way, Card earned a master's degree in literature and has anabiding love for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boccaccio, and the Medieval Romance. He has taught writing courses atseveral universities and at such workshops as Antioch, Clarion, Clarion West, and the Cape Cod WritersWorkshop. It is fair to say that Orson Scott Card has examined storytelling from every angle.Born in Richland, Washington, Card grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He lived in Brazil for two yearsas an unpaid missionary for the Mormon Church and received degrees from Brigham Young University and theUniversity of Utah. He currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine, and their threechildren, Geoffrey, Emily, and Charles (named for Chaucer, Bronte, and Dickens).
Introduction
A writer never knows who's going to be reading his book, but I've made a few assumptions about you, anyway. Ifigure that you're probably not yet an established writer in the genre of speculative fiction, or you wouldn't feel aneed to read a book on how to write it. Still, you have a genuine interest in writing science fiction and fantasy,not because you have some notion that it's somehow "easier" to make a buck in this field (if that's your delusion,give it up at once!), but rather because you believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best receivedby the science fiction and fantasy audience.I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-mindedand intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be ledinto places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honor when
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they applaud the tales you tell.What I can't do in a book this brief is tell you everything you need to know about writing fiction. What I can do istell you everything I know about how to write speculative fiction in particular. I've written a whole book oncharacterization and point of view, so I hardly need to cover that same material here; nor will I attempt to teachyou plotting or style, dialogue or marketing or copyright law or any of the other things that writers of 
every
kindof fiction have to know something about. But I can attempt to tell you the things that only the writers of speculative fiction need to worry about: world creation, alien societies, the rules of magic, rigorous extrapolationof possible futures - tasks that don't come up in your average mystery or romance or literary tale.To do that, I've divided this book into five chapters of varying length. Chapter I deals with the boundaries of speculative fiction; it's an essay on what science fiction and fantasy are, so that you can get an idea of the rangeof possibilities and educate yourself with the literature that has gone before.Chapter II, the longest, begins the practical, hands-on work of world creation, perhaps the most vital step increating a good speculative story.Chapter III deals with the structuring of a science fiction or fantasytale-how you go about turning your world into a story, or making your story work well within its world.With Chapter IV, we go through the actual writing process, dealing with the problems of exposition and languagethat only speculative fiction writers face.The first part of Chapter V deals with the practical business of selling science fiction and fantasy-though you'dbetter check the copyright date on this edition of the book before acting on my advice, since this is the sectionmost likely to become outdated.And also in Chapter V we get a little personal and I offer you some advice on how to live successfully as ascience fiction or fantasy writer. Not that I know how you should live your life-but I have made some really first-rate mistakes in my time, and have seen others make some doozies, too, and if by forewarning you I can forewarnyou, I think it's worth the effort.
1. The Infinite Boundary
 
It was 1975. I was twenty-four years old. The naive ambitions of youth were beginning to be tempered byreality.
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I had written a couple of dozen plays and more than half of them had been produced in college or communitytheatres-for a total remuneration of about $300. At that rate, I figured, I had only to write sixteen full-length playsa week to make $10,000 a year-hardly major money, even then. And I was fast, but not that fast.Furthermore, the non-profit theatre company I had started was tumbling toward bankruptcy with all its debtslooming over me. My day job as an editor with a university press didn't pay me enough to live on, let alone paywhat the company owed. The only thing I knew how to do that had any hope of bringing in extra money waswriting- and it was plain that I'd have to find something to write besides plays.I had dabbled in science fiction for years, reading quite a bit of it, even trying my hand at a few stories. For awhile in my late teens I had even worked on a cycle of stories tracing the development of a family with peculiarpsychic abilities as they worked out their genetic destiny on a colony planet. Now, with new enthusiasm-or was itdesperation?-I dusted off the best of them, one that had once earned a nice note from an editor, and proceeded torewrite it from beginning to end.It was the tale of a wandering tinker who had a psionic gift that manifested itself in two ways: He couldcommunicate with birds, and he could heal the sick. When he returned to his hometown, Worthing, a medievilvillage deep in the Forest of Waters, he came into conflict with the villagers over their treatment of his birds;eventually he was blamed for an epidemic that carried off many villagers during a devastating winter storm, andthey killed him.In short, it was the sort of 
 perky, cheerful little
tale that I've been writing ever since.As I rewrote "Tinker," I was delighted to see how terrible the earlier version had been. After all, if I could see, attwenty-four, how bad the story was that looked so brilliant to me at nineteen, it must mean I had learnedsomething in the intervening years. So it was with high hopes that I typed the new draft, tucked it into anenvelope and mailed it away to Analog magazine.Why Analog? Because in those days it was the only science fiction magazine that was listed in
Writer's Market. I 
had never actually read an issue of the magazine. Still, my story was science fiction, and Analog was a sciencefiction magazine. What could be more logical?The story came back in due course, rejected. But there was something in the accompanying letter to encourageme. Ben Bova, then editor of Analog, told me that he liked the way I wrote and hoped to see more stories fromme.So why was he rejecting "Tinker"?Because it wasn't science fiction. "Analog publishes only science fiction," said Ben, so of course a fantasy like"Tinker" simply wouldn't do.I was outraged-at first. "Tinker" had psionic powers, a colony planet, a far future time period-if that wasn'tscience fiction, what was?
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