Category: Blogs

Why Sci-Fi?

A little rid bit on why I have decided to act on my desire to write science fiction.

I thought I’d stretch a bit and this time take a walk into another realm. Once again, I am genre hopping.

This genre has always intrigued me but it wasn’t until four years ago that I decided to pick up a sci-fi novel and give it another go. I mean a real chance. My previous ventures into reading science fiction had been short lived.

I found some of the stories I came across too far-fetched to even pretend they are realistic or possible. (This could be a huge flaw but that’s just how my brain works.) I need to be able to believe what is written is possible although the technology may not exist (yet).

But that still doesn’t answer the question, why sci-fi?

I have to be a bit of an ass and ask, why not? Also, it is freaking cool. Not to mention the uptick in Black women writing sci-fi. This discovery had me weak in the knees, and I wanted to delve into the genre even more.

For one birthday, I was given N.K. Jemisin’s How Long ’til Black Future Month?. I had never heard of this author so when I turned it over and read the back cover I saw a face that looked like mine. I geeked out much to the annoyance of my co-workers. That weekend Fifth Season on my bookshelf.

That gift as simple as it was, meant something. It was beyond the fact that my friend and co-worker apparently knew me better than I had originally thought. But it also gave me a sense of ‘you are a writer’; you can create your world and put onto paper whatever the hell YOU want. You can write science fiction too!

Simply because you are a woman that is Black doesn’t mean that you are confined to only write social justice pieces, although I don’t find anything wrong with that type of writing and greatly believe in its importance, but there are some of us that want to show off our talents and imaginations.

We are more than down-trodden individuals, we are lively and brimming with ideas, stories and we bring a different perspective to a world that’s overflowing with the same type of sci-fi/fantasy writer.

Some of us color outside the lines or just miss the paper entirely.

Quiet

Two swings at a writing prompt challenge-the word that week was ‘Quiet.’

Below are two versions of what I wrote for a writing prompt challenge that I participated in September of last year.

1st Attempt at ‘Quiet’

Desolation.

The street light flickered and I knew another wave was coming. Of what I wasn’t quite sure and in the window seat I slid down a little further and clutched Knubby a bit closer. I did it as if to shield her or attempt to protect myself, I am still unsure of which.

2nd Attempt at ‘Quiet’

The fridge buzzed as if letting me know it was doing its job. It made a show of keeping everything cold. The humming picked up as I turned and eyed the appliance. She was defiant letting me know that she wouldn’t be bullied into being quiet-silent.

Silent.

That word rattled around in my head long after I had lain down in my twin bed for the night.

She wasn’t like me at a loss for words always grasping at syllables and frantically attempting to string them together.

Words. Little things that conveyed thoughts and emotions. I was desperate to let someone know mine and yet I was at a loss.

How Writing FanFiction Has Made Me a Better Writer

Initially, fan fiction had been my saving grace giving me an outlet to write using characters and storylines from tv shows, books and movies that interested me but I thought could have ended differently. It gave me a chance to play around with couplings that I thought should have totally happened or that would have been interesting if they had happened.

Below I detail my introduction to fanfic, becoming a fanfic author and the lessons that several very honest and at times nasty reviews have taught me about writing.

What is this?

I stumbled upon fan fiction in the late summer of 2010. I had just graduated high school a few months previously and was looking forward to college. My mother had become ill and had to stay in the hospital for several days and to pass time I took full advantage of the free WiFi. I can’t recall what led me to click or what I typed into the Google search but there was this word I had never heard of before, fanfiction or fanfic for short.

This was intriguing.

“I had my ass handed to me, digitally, chapter by chapter; and it was the most eye opening thing that could have happened to me as new writer.”

It Begins

I began to read several stories a day and created an account on a fanfic platform with a very catchy screen name. My first attempt at writing and publishing a story online came in the form of a Harry Potter one-shot ( a short story in which the writer will continue no further) and it was absolutely awful.

Every bit of that 2,192 word story was rushed and it was obvious.

The prospect of having one of my stories live forever in the digital void had me excited, thrilled even to the point I opened up a word doc and frantically typed the night way, all the while skipping story continuity and plot development.

Although I am not an English buff or part of the grammar patrol, persistent errors tend to be a bit of a pet peeve I have developed over these past few years. But what I truly lacked was continuity. The story was all over the place there was no connection as the reader moved through each chapter. It was as if every chapter represented a different thought and they all could become their own one-shots.

A properly developed story has to be just that developed. I learned this the hard way. The lesson came in the form of some nasty reviews. I vividly recall the reviews of one reader of another fanfic I had written. This person reviewed each chapter (at the time I had written and posted 22 chapters) and each was at minimum a paragraph laying out everywhere I went wrong with the characters and how the story line didn’t make sense in certain places. For newly starting out me, those reviews delivered the equivalent of a digital right hook leaving my jaw on my keys.

Now, the tricky thing with using worlds and characters that others have created and that are well known, in the case with Harry Potter, Twilight, etc., the reader enters into the story with a certain expectation of how that character’s personality and how they should behave.

For me that is the beauty of fan fiction. I can give the reader a new perspective on a well known character and this has afforded me the opportunity to see the humanity in the characters that I create. I have learned how to make them real. Writing these stories gives me practice with continuity and simply put I really enjoy writing them and I can honestly type that after playing in someone else’s world it inspired me to create my own.