Sci-Fi Writing

This workbook turns the Sci-Fi Writing course into hands-on construction of your own premise, extrapolation, exposition, and wonder. Each section maps to a course module and pairs exercises, fill-in worksheets, and checklists you can run against your work in progress, plus editable templates for a premise and novum tracker, an extrapolation cascade, and an exposition and incluing audit. Work one section per module, keep a running project file, and use the action plan to take a single speculative idea from a one-line novum to a fully outlined, wonder-bearing story.

Build your central idea as a single clear novum, frame it as a generative question, and protect it by changing only one fundamental thing.

State the single new thing that is true in your world and not in ours, in one plain sentence with no jargon. Then apply the collapse test: imagine deleting that change and ask whether the plot survives. If the story still works without the novum, you have written something else in a science fiction costume, and you must either rebuild the plot around the change or find a stronger one. Finally, name the real-world subject the change lets the reader see freshly.

Decide which of Heinlein's three questions your premise asks: what if, if only, or if this goes on. Then test whether it can carry a whole book by listing ten distinct situations or problems the premise generates. If you stall well before ten, the idea may belong in a short story rather than a novel. Mark which human domains those situations touch (love, work, faith, power, death, family, identity).

Fill this in to confirm you are spending your impossibility budget on a single change and deriving everything else.

Place your story deliberately on the hard-to-soft spectrum, keep that register consistent, and extrapolate your premise into second- and third-order consequences.

Place your story on the hard-to-soft spectrum and write one sentence on why that position serves your premise. Name whether your rigor lives in the physical sciences or the social sciences. Then read your opening pages and list the signals that tell readers which register to expect. Finally, hunt for any single element that violates that register, the hand-waved drive in an otherwise hard book, and decide to fix it, foreshadow it, or move the whole story softer.

Take your novum and push past its obvious first-order effect, which you should write down and then cross out as merely the starting point. Run the change through the human domains (economy, law, war, family, religion, art, class, daily routine), and for each effect ask and what does that cause, following the two or three strongest threads two or three steps deeper. Note where you surprised yourself, and note the losers as well as the winners.

Use this when your premise extends a real present trend into the future.

Cut the info-dumps, convey the world through incluing and use, and pace necessary explanation on a need-to-know schedule through the right viewpoint.

Scan your opening chapters for the two classic patterns. Mark every as-you-know line where one character tells another something they both already know, and every maid-and-butler scene where characters narrate the world to each other for the reader's benefit. For each block of front-loaded explanation longer than a few lines, ask whether the reader needs it now or only when it first affects a character they care about, and move or cut it accordingly.

Pick one piece of your world you were about to explain and rewrite it so a character simply uses it, without comment, the way Heinlein's the door dilated implies an iris door from a single verb. Replace a sentence of description with one loaded verb or detail. Present the strange thing as ordinary, letting the character react with habit or irritation rather than awe, and trust the reader to assemble the technology from the interaction.

List the facts about your world the reader must eventually learn, and schedule each to the moment it first matters.

Engineer awe through scale, otherness, and the conceptual breakthrough, build reveals with setup and contrast, and handle every trope deliberately.

Choose your story's single biggest wonder and decide its source: vast scale, true otherness, or conceptual breakthrough. Protect it by resisting an early or cheap reveal. Plant small, unexplained mysteries in the chapters before it so curiosity accumulates, and filter the reveal through one ordinary human reaction so the vast has a scale to measure against. Then replace every adjective of awe (incredible, breathtaking) with a concrete detail: a number, a distance, a physical sensation, a consequence.

Plant a false model of the world that your characters and reader currently believe. Decide the truer, larger reality that will replace it, and write the moment the comfortable model shatters and the vaster one is revealed. Position this breakthrough at a turning point so the discovery is also the plot climax, with awe and pivot arriving in the same beat.

Run your draft against the most worn science fiction tropes and decide, for each one present, how you will handle it: subvert, deepen, or earn.