Do prewrites work? Or do they limit your creativity because you feel the need to stick to the prewrite?
 

yes people, i'm still here, just not often..

I always do a lot of prewriting. By "a lot," I mean a whole bucketful. As I've only written SS's and novelettes so far, my prewriting often takes more paper than my final drafts.

I always plan my characters' backgrounds, personality sketches... resumes, even.

But the genre I write requires a lot more pre-writing work than any other. (Well, IMHO. Surely Tolkien made a few notes, eh? Please don't flame me over this.)

Design the spaceship, draw it, diagram the bridge consoles, calculate the engines' specific impulse and thrust. Plug the ship's mass and the engine efficiency into a differential equation, get the fuel requirements. Plot its orbit. "Hohmann transfer to Mars? Too slow. Continuous five gee?"

I've also found the book World Building, by Gillett to be indispensable. (See my review on amazon.com)

I've written huge programs in Excel to build my planets for me. Pick a star type, planet size and solar flux and the program calculates the rest for you. (Average temperature, escape velocity, Roche's limit, orbital velocities and periods, etc.) (Anybody want a copy? email me.)

So, what's my point?

Do as much prewriting as you need, but no more. I often get carried away and end up wasting time calculating things that I don't need.

[This message has been edited by chad_parish (edited June 19, 2001).]
 

Hope that helps.

In the past I have usually worked out all the details on paper. In my current work, everything is in my head. (Actually I did write some of it down a few years ago, but I lost those notes).

I think my writing might benefit if a took a pause from the plot and mapped out the details of the characters a bit better. It could save some rewriting later. Thank you!
 

Example: I've spent today at work performing computational thermodynamic simulations of refractory-metal carbo-nitrides in steel. (I love my job.)

But, you're right -- Most of my stories greatly improve when I take a flame-thrower to the first draft. Over-planning is one of my problems; my characters get hemmed in.

Example, form my latest project:

Captain: "Let's set course to Neptune."
Crew: "We don't want to go to Neptune!"
Author: "Oh, shit! Think fast..."
Crew: "Wait -- our Aunt Millie has a summer cabin on Neptune. We can visit her while we're there!"
Author: "That was close!"

Now, why go to all this trouble?

I don't want to violate a physical law unless I know I'm violating it and I fudge deliberately. Example: Larry Niven's story "Singularities Make Me Nervous." In the anthology I have, he admits he fudged the physics (he used a stellar-mass black hole, but needed a galactic-mass black hole); otherwise the story wouldn't work.

But, hey, I'm an engineer.

[This message has been edited by chad_parish (edited June 19, 2001).]
 

*shudders at memory of college physics*
*shudders again*

You did say something else that I wanted to comment on. "I don't want to violate a physical law unless I know I'm violating it and I fudge deliberately." According to Stephen King, one of the finer points of telling a "make believe" story is that you can have 1 lie, only one, and everything else must be true. Readers will accept the one "fudge" if everything else is surrounded by believability. Which, I'm sure you already know having learned from such greats as Larry Niven... but it's been a "truth" that I've had to work very hard on in my own writing.

Anyway, enough ranting, work day is done. I'm outta here!
 

Personally, I have an aversion to the type of lies that violate the laws of nature (i.e. anything supernatural). I consider most of Stephen King's stuff to be boring because it is too far from reality. If Sherlock Holmes and Horatio Hornblower can have adventures that obey the laws of nature, then so can science fiction characters.

Like Chad, I am an engineer. I like to have the equations balance. When I read a story about a spaceship going to Neptune, the writer had better not describe the size, mass, power source, or other factors in such a way as to make the journey impossible.

If you want to sharpen these skills, the book "The Physics of Star Trek" is an excellent reference. It is not a Trek book; it is a physics book that happens to have the words Star Trek in its title. It was written by Lawrence Krauss, head of the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University (my neighborhood), with a forward by Stephen Hawking. In it, Dr. Krauss discusses many science fiction staples, and bashes quite a few of them.

When I write, I assume that Dr. Krauss is going to read my book and torment me for any scientific faux pas.

I also have a friend who is a professional astronomer and another who is a professional physical anthropologist. I want my writing to get a clean bill of health from them, too.

It ain't easy being clean.

Fortunately, my circle of friends does not include any English majors. I am free to commit unspeakable atrocities against the English language with a clear conscience.
 

It's awful big, but there are some real gems.
 

I am my own harshest critic when it comes to believable science fiction, and the most difficult thing to deal with is my personal hobby field: Artificial Intelligence.

It is fairly easy to write about realistic artificial intelligence technology. What is difficult is staging an adventure in a society with advanced AI. Machines are rapidly gaining on humans in all cognitive abilities, and any story set after about 2050 ought to include machines with artificial consciousness that can think any thought that a human can think.

In the example of a ship going to Neptune, I would demand to know why the ship has a human crew at all. I would also want to know why Aunt Millie has a summer cabin there. Manned spaceflight is difficult, complex, expensive, and inconvenient. The author had better justify every bit of action that involves a human, every risk taken by a human.

If a human crew goes to Neptune, they had better be doing something that a machine cannot do. Otherwise the story is junk.

(I warned you that I was harsh.)

[This message has been edited by Doc Brown (edited June 21, 2001).]
 

The actual reason I use for convincing the crew to go to Neptune is, of course, money.

Who could you convince to spend three years in micro-gee, facing micrometeors, etc?

Mercenary egocentrics, of course! (Except for our tormented captain, who can't bear the thought of staying on Earth because... wait till the stories done, then find out.) They'll spend an extra five months swinging past Neptune for a cool Billion each.

As for "why manned spacefilght?" Well, that's tough, I admit. Short version: the story doesn't work otherwise.

You're right; this is something I need to think about. Partial justifactions I've already inserted are that, 1, it's the farthest expedition to date -- it's not routine. 2, it's a multipart mission (each performed under contract, spreading the cost around), and the crewmembers are specialists performing the different missions.

Perhaps it's a proof-of-concept? One of the jobs they did before my story opened was to repair and refurbish a deep-space (ie, Kuiper-belt) telescope, evidently under contract from the government.

Further, the ship is owned by private industry -- maybe it's, in addition to the other jobs, also a publicity stunt? "If we can fix a telscope out in the ass-end of nowhere, we can service your satellites!"

As far as AI: I have a few autonomous, though somewhat dim, robots staffing the ship.

[This message has been edited by chad_parish (edited June 21, 2001).]
 

I was explaining the reason why I shoot down 90%+ of my own story ideas. Realistically, I can imagine lots of commercial applications for private industry in space. But I can think of very, very few reasons why a company or government would go to the trouble if send ing a human employee. Even if I go thousands of years into the future, with very high spacecraft technology, all I come up with is better machines which could do everything in space better than a human.

Humans simply are not designed for spaceflight.
 

Good luck!
 

First, work out how your fictional dimensions and cloning work. Figure out the rules. Research as much as you feel you should. Figure out what could break, and use this to torment your characters.

But, when you write, stick to these rules!

Card wrote something like, "If your character gets three magic wishes, and uses all three, and makes a FOURTH wish to save the day at the end, the reader will throw the book against the wall in disgust."

Examples

Fantasy: The Lord of the Rings
The ring corrupts everyone who uses it, as Tolkien told us at the beginning. Even good-natured Frodo. Tolkien doesn't give him an exemption.

Sci-Fi: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Once the rebels shoot bombs at Earth, nothing can stop the law of gravity. They can re-direct the bombs, dependant on how fast they're going, but the bombs are going to hit somewhere like meteors, even after Earth surrenders.

 

It IS important to know what you are getting into.

My favorite advice and I think it was from Card in a book or someplace (not sure) was to know the ending of a book before you know where it ends. Thats the part that matters. Star Wars could have started at the Death Star battle on Yavin, one could argure, and just be one huge fight for two hours with planning etc, they just MENTION that Luke was from Tatoonie etc. But they didnt, and so the story was different. A story will or should have a real ending first, or early in its life, otherwise you may fall into run on stories that just go no where and bore readers with their drabble. I did that once, but it was in 3rd grade so I figure I am past that now. My more recent stuff has had a full arc before the first word has been written. All in my head, I dont write a scratch on paper though, its not for me.