Language and culture are inextricably linked. Using other languages in your fiction can help to create a three-dimensional, fully-realized world for the reader, but it can also pull them out of your story and leave them bored, confused, or frustrated if you overdo it.
Like many aspects of fiction (and life), it comes down to finding the right balance. This tends to be especially difficult for those who write their own languages—and understandably so. It takes a lot of work to write a language and you want to show it off. The best way to do that, though, is to integrate it smoothly into your overall storytelling.
You can think of speculative fiction as a kind of super-genre. Stories that live under this broad umbrella all deviate in some way from the laws and rules of everyday reality. That could mean they’re set in an entirely invented reality or in a world mostly like our own with a few minor tweaks, or anywhere in between.
The term speculative fiction was first coined by Robert Heinlein in the late 1940s, so it’s hardly a new concept. Its associations have shifted over the decades, though, from a term mostly syonymous with sci-fi to one that’s more fluid. In today’s parlance, speculative also includes fantasy and most horror, as well as stories that exist between the borders of these genres. It’s become an especially popular term among those who write settings or tropes from fantasy and sci-fi in a literary style.
Freelancing is arguably the easiest way to start writing for a living. Freelancer platforms certainly make it look appealing, and while you probably don’t need me to tell you most freelancers don’t work at beach or on a lakeside dock, these ads promote a more pervasive misperception, too—that if you can write well, you can be successful as a freelance writer.
The truth is more complicated. Yes, you do need to have a certain level of writing ability to be a freelancer, but you don’t need to be a “great writer” and having that kind of advanced mastery won’t guarantee you success. There are other skills that I’d argue are equally important if you want to turn freelance writing into a sustainable full-time career. Based on my experience, these are the most important.
“What genre do you write?” On the surface that seems like a pretty straightforward question, but anyone who’s spent some time in the literary world knows it can get weirdly complicated—especially for those of us who write in the styles often shoehorned under “genre” (AKA anything that’s not literary realism).
The impetus for this post was a panel at this year’s Chicon/Worldcon. The focus of that panel was a bit broader, looking at cats across sci-fi and fantasy—not anthropomorphized, humanoid felines, which are their own unique subset of fictional races, and not other felines like lions and panthers, but Standard Issue Cats in human-dominated worlds.
There were a lot of great questions raised at that panel, like how storytellers use cats in their narratives, the difference between an animal and human character, and the broader role of pets and animals in general in human-centric sci-fi worlds. So I decided to take a closer look at some of my favorite space cats to see how their creators answered those questions.
Read this if you like: Unique magic systems, religious dystopias
tl;dr summary: Young Acolyte living on a floating city is caught up in the intrigue of her cannibalistic magic sisterhood.
One piece of advice new writers hear a lot is to avoid the passive voice. It’s right there in Strunk & White, rule number 14: “Use the active voice.” What many citers of this rule ignore is that they go on to say that, while the active voice is more “direct and vigorous” than passive:
This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.
So when can you use passive voice, when should you use active voice, and why does it matter? Let’s start with the basics.
Chapbook-length manuscripts are admittedly more common for poetry than for fiction, but that certainly doesn’t mean they’re off-limits for prose writers. This length of around 20-40 pages is ideal for collections of micro-fiction and micro-essays, as well as stand alone short stories and essays that aren’t quite big enough to be novellas (if you write things that straddle that length divide, you can check out my list of long short story and novella publishers to find more places to send them).
Since this length and style of book has been considered the domain of poets for so long, though, searching for fiction chapbook publishers can be frustrating. They’re definitely out there—it can just take creative search terms and time spent scouring press guidelines to find them.
