GUEST POST & GIVEAWAY: Three Steps to Writing a Dystopian Novel by David Kubicek

Please extend a warm welcome to David Kubicek, who has wandered into the ruins today to talk about his book, A Friend of the Family.

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Three Steps to Writing a Dystopian Novel: Balancing World-Building with Character-Building

by David Kubicek

Occasionally I’ve heard science fiction writers complain that in order to create a future world or alternate reality they have to sacrifice characterization; to create a world and to create characters would take too long, be too wordy, and might bore the readers.



That is crap. It’s an excuse used by 1) lazy writers who don’t want to bother with characterization, and 2) inexperienced writers who haven’t yet learned to “show, don’t tell.”



Ray Bradbury created an unfamiliar world populated with well-defined characters in Fahrenheit 451, as did Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale, as did Suzanne Collins in The Hunger Games, as have many other science fiction and fantasy writers.



You don’t need to waste lots of words describing your futuristic world; a few well-chosen words will do. In one of his stories, Robert A. Heinlein has doors that operate like camera shutters; they open and close automatically when someone passes through them. To communicate this concept to his readers, as his character approaches a door, Heinlein writes three words: “The door dilated.”



Similarly, don’t waste words describing your characters; show them in action. The best way to engage your readers is to create characters who are like them, characters who want the same things and who react emotionally in the same ways. This establishes an emotional bond between your characters and your readers.



To create a dystopian world, find something that may be slightly wrong in our contemporary society and exaggerate it so that it is has caused your future society to be seriously out of whack. For example, Ray Bradbury took censorship to the next level in Fahrenheit 451 when he envisioned a future in which firemen seek out illegal collections of books and burn them.



So you have characters to whom your readers can relate, and you have a society in which something is broken. Now combine the two.



Remember that, although the characters have an emotional tie to contemporary readers, their thoughts and actions must be consistent with the society in which they live. In Fahrenheit 451, for example, at the front of the characters’ minds all the time is the knowledge that possessing a book is a serious crime. They know also that speeding 100 miles per hour down the freeway and trying to hit anything that moves is a good, and accepted, form of recreation.

That’s it in a nutshell. Writing a solid dystopian story is as easy as writing a contemporary story if you follow these three guidelines:

• Create characters of the future to whom contemporary readers can relate


• Exaggerate a flaw in contemporary society until you’ve created a world that is seriously broken


• The thoughts and actions of the characters must be consistent with the society in which they live

Good Luck!

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GIVEAWAY!!!

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