“A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”
–Theodore Sturgeon
I was poking around the many How-To-Write blogs online a few days ago, and I came across one that made me stare in utter disbelief. It was a worksheets-and-examples site – one of those that begins by asserting that all writers need to figure out their entire novel in advance according to their particular system (which they will helpfully sell you for the low, low price of $300 for the first packet of worksheets).
Normally, I would have simply skipped that one, but it caught my eye because it was giving out “free samples” – that is, if you jumped through a couple of hoops, they would provide you with a brand new, fully developed outline for a story, so you could see what a properly done outline looks like (and use it to produce your very own novel). Unable to resist, I jumped through the hoops and downloaded the sample.
I should have known better.
I won’t go into many of the horrific details, except to say that it purported to be “In the Science Fiction Genre!” and had clearly been written by someone whose exposure to SF was limited to movies like “Plan 9 From Outer Space” and who had no idea that the “science” part of “science fiction” was supposed to have any resemblance whatever to reality.
What made me stare in horrified disbelief was the cheerful assertion, at the bottom of page 15, that if the writer was scared of writing SF, or if it just wasn’t their thing, they could easily use the plot by simply changing a few names and locations. You could make it a Western by using search-and-replace to change “spaceship” to “wagon train” and “Alpha Centauri” to “San Francisco”! Or make it a contemporary Romance set entirely in New York City by changing “spaceship” to “taxi” and “Alpha Centauri” to “Times Square”!
It isn’t that easy to switch a detailed plot from one genre to another. “Genre conventions” are more than a matter of using the right terminology. A murder mystery is centered around solving a murder; you cannot simply change the detective’s name to “Indiana,” the time period to “World War II,” and the murder motive to “murderer wants map” and end up with “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” If you want to switch your murder-mystery plot to an action-adventure, the murder has to stop being the center of the story. It can still happen, but the focus of the story will need to be on something besides simply proving whodunnit and why … something like keeping the Nazi bad guys from getting hold of the Arc of the Covenant.
Similarly, switching the genre of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” from action-adventure to Romance would need a total shift in focus. Yes, there’s a romantic subplot in the original movie, but bringing it forward and making it the center of the story would not be a simple matter. A lot of the action elements would have to be downplayed in order to make room for the relationship, and ideally, even the climax would focus more on saving the love interest than on stopping the Nazis, even if both things still happen.
It is easier (and often more obvious) to switch a plot from one genre to another if the conventions of the two are relatively close to begin with, and/or relatively general. Turning an action-adventure plot into a Horror plot is usually not as difficult as changing a hard SF plot into a historical Romance. “Action-adventure” and “Horror” are both top-level genres; it isn’t difficult to find a plot-and-action oriented subgenre of Horror (Zombie Apocalypse, anyone?) into which one can transmute a plot-and-action oriented action-adventure plot.
Hard SF and historical Romance, on the other hand, are each a subgenre with tighter constraints. Hard SF is idea-and-science focused; historical Romance is historical-setting-and-character focused. The two can be meshed, but it takes more attention and effort, and the resultant historical Romance will probably not be as easily identified as having originated with the hard SF plot.
The real key to adapting one genre plot to a different genre is familiarity, especially familiarity with the genre one is switching to. People who do a quick review of the current bestsellers with a view to identifying a particular genre’s conventions are setting themselves up to make a lot of subtle (and not-so-subtle) mistakes that devoted genre readers will reject instantly. (I’m thinking here of a “crossover” Romance/SF novel from a couple of decades back that did reasonably well as a Romance, but bombed in the SF community the Romance writer was trying to reach. The writer had used a number of implausible/unrealistic ideas, most notably the “hollow Earth with an alien civilization inside” that has been passé in SF since the 1930s, at least.)
One sees this kind of thing a lot among both would-be writers and established writers who spot a “hot” trend in a genre that’s unfamiliar to them, and decide that they can make a lot of money writing whatever it is. It never ends well.
Bottom line: Write the stuff you love to read. If you love murder mysteries, go ahead and turn Sense and Sensibility into a murder mystery … but don’t try to turn The Big Sleep into a historical Romance if you’ve never read any Romances, or have read some and disliked them.
You said it. I’ve read a couple of SF Romances where the writer knew romance but not SF, and they were indeed disappointing.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sidelines: Talks and Essays delves into those two genres’ conventions, for those who might want to get into this more.
I think “genre” may be used to mean several related things – the trappings, like magic or spaceships or dragons, the sort of story that’s being told, and related to that the patterns that the reader is expected to recognise (e.g. that it’s not new and exciting to make your climax the revelation that people are being grown for their organs, because we did that in the 1970s).
It’s very easy to write a romance story and copy-and-paste spaceships or dragons into it, but there’s a risk that it’ll annoy both the spec-fic fans you hoped to lure in (because it’s not literate in the language of spec-fic) and the romance fans you hoped to keep (because what are these spaceships/dragons doing in my romance). See also the recent failed TV show Frequency, which annoyed SF fans by being basically a procedural cop show with incidental cross-time communication and annoyed cop show fans by having cross-time communication in it.
When I sat down to write what became my first novel, I had a hard time committing to it, because I thought of myself as an SF writer and it was profoundly not SF. I seriously considered adding aircars and ray guns and such. It would’ve made a couple of things easier, but it wouldn’t have changed the fundamental story a bit, and that’s why I finally decided against it.
Which does not change my opinion that the “hollow Earth with an alien civilization inside” idea could be a lot of fun, if handled by an author who knew what they were doing with it.
Hmm. As an annoying person* with some background in two relevant fields (physics and geology), I’d love to read either a definitely-not-hard-science-fiction piece that vaguely explained the existence of aliens inside a hollow Earth with no pretense at realism, then employed those aliens in a wonderfully well-written reality-dismissing story; or a piece that somehow provided a scientifically plausible explanation for how aliens and a hollow Earth wouldn’t contradict every single actual geological phenomenon that we’ve observed. …I’d be very impressed and surprised if anyone managed the latter. (But I’d be very happy to read the former!)
*”annoying person” = person in a critique group who points out that someone’s carefully constructed plot device violates at least one law of physics; provides too many suggestions for fixing the plot device; and, if the author looks unimpressed with all of the device-fixing options, recommends removing details until no one can really tell that the device wouldn’t work in our universe.
That sounds like an interesting challenge. Since I write sci-fi and I’m married to a geologist, I might give it a try! I wonder how hollow the hollow earth would have to be… not completely hollow of course. That would be ridiculous. Unless there’s a micro black hole keeping the earth together? I think The gravity would be too strong.
And the aliens would have to be thermophiles, given the temps down there. I’ve talked to cavers who have gone deep underground, and they can’t work too long in those conditions…
Uh oh. Now I’m getting interested in writing this!
A mystery reader, confronted with a large mass of sudden detail, is going to go—subconsciously, at least—”Aha! somewhere in all of this the writer has planted a Clue!”, and look for that; a reader trained exclusively in mainstream literary fiction is likely to say, “Aha! all this emphasis must point to something of Thematic Importance!”, but an experienced reader of science fiction is going to assume that he or she is meant to take all of those details and out of them construct a world.
Which is why the writer of a science-fiction mystery with literary ambitions is trying to do a quadruple somersault off the trapeze without a net.
― Debra Doyle
And, contrariwise, an established writer of non-SFF trying to write SFF is going to have great difficulty in not messing it up. Two examples:
John Hersey’s _White Lotus_, a mainstream writer trying to write alt-history. He had the laudable ambition of saying to white people, “How would you feel if it happened to you?” and spins a story of a white teenager sold into slavery in a China that hasn’t existed since 1912, and in the course of ten or fifteen years goes through emancipation, marginalization and tenant farming, and civil rights activism. Several hundred years of history mirrored in part of one lifetime.
Lawrence Block’s adult career was as a mystery writer, but he learned his skills writing porn. His _Random Walk alternates chapters covering a vicious mass murderer, his assaults and murders expressed in juicy detail, with chapters about a group of people who for some reason unknown to themselves or anybody else, start walking across the United States. In the last chapter they all meet up, and (I’m trying to remember, because it was all so forgettable) the murderer dies in a shoot-up(?) and the walkers experience some kind of epiphany that is not described.
Both books sold on the power of the authors’ names, and both were No Darned Good.