You have moved to a small oceanside town. Your mother, a librarian, takes you to work with her each day in the summertime. Unfortunately, you hate reading. Impatient, you begin to explore the library's dustier shelves and discover an old journal. It speaks of half-fish, half-human creatures. One day, while out riding your bike, you spot one such creature beached on the sand. She seems to be about your age. You help her and make an unlikely—and forbidden—friend.
Read that story below, where the author shares his advice for writers who want to write science-fiction:
My advice for those of you who want to write science fiction is to start as early as possible. I wrote my first science fiction story, when I was about twelve years old, so this is by no means restricted to the teenage years. The first two stories I wrote were both science fiction, and I had always wanted to write science fiction. My stories started out as short stories, short short stories, and then they became novellas, then short novellas, then full length books. So I was writing science fiction earlier on and I do think that is the way to go. I think that young writers should travel in other genres and try other things like mysteries, pick up different ones and read a lot as well. I think that for a young writer, writing about your own experience is an important way to start. Just because that is the way in which we get our stuff out in the first place: writing about what you know. I think that is also an important note as a teenager. I think you should try to write about what you know. My stories began with writing about what I knew. Then they started to develop in their own way.
But the thing to do is just not to shy away from writing something you don't like and then start improving upon that and see what happens.
Mary Robinette Kowal has said once, in one of those interviews, that she had written something called a Christmas story and the next year, she had written a Christmas story, and then told the same story that she had written the year before, but she had improved and I think that's what we should strive for next year and the year after that.
I think it's a good idea to write stories that take place in your town, or in your town with one or two minor variations. I think that's an important step to take. Not writing about your own town, but actually writing about the things that you know.
Then you can learn the science and then you can write the science in a way that makes sense.
If you write it as a fantasy, it's very likely for the science to go completely berserk and for the fantasy elements to come in and scramble the science so that no one will understand what you write. If you write science fiction, it's actually very little of you writing about the science and a lot of you writing about what you know.
I think you should write about what you know and then try to do that with the science. I think you should do a bunch of reading in whatever the science fiction genre is about, so you can understand it and you can represent it in a way that makes sense and in a way that you can read with your own eyes and say 'yes: that's what I saw' or 'that's not what I saw, that's not what maybe happened.'
I think, when you look at science fiction, you should try to find something that looks sort of like your own life, and then you write it with one or two details that are different and then you kill the rest.
I'm just trying to say that it's not a bad idea to write science fiction because you are a kid. It's a good idea, because it's something that releases you from your current life and allows you to explore something that you could not explore in your normal life, in your normal time. I'm saying that now because I think it was a good idea for me when I was a kid.
Thank you for taking the time to help us understand your story better.