How to Write Spec Fic

I don't know what I've gotten myself into. A year ago, I launched a Substack on the foolhardy belief I was ready to write a massive work of speculative fiction. Because my writing veers towards epistolary for longer works, the plan was to drip-feed characters' diary entries as blog posts and create an online archive of quasi-apocalyptic stories, not dissimilar to SCP.

For a while I sprinted with the idea, dedicating entire afternoons to research and chancing a few freewrites that will surely become rewrites. I learned that spec-fic includes sci-fi, horror and fantasy, and many great works combine elements of these three genres. I developed four protagonists and even made a playlist. I was playacting someone who knew what they were doing. Someone who was writing a novel. I even scribbled out a short sci-fi story, to which someone at my writing group responded, "have you ever written a short story before?"

And that question gnawed at the back of my mind: what was I doing? Daunted, I let my pace slow down as work pressure increased, other writing deadlines piled up, and I shifted focus back to pitching my first novel to literary agents. When writing about the present day or the past, that sort of break is fine. Not much about your core idea will change, even if you have to nudge your timeline one notch back from "present" to "recent past".

However, when writing about the future, and working in tech policy during a year as tumultuous as 2024, one month's break can completely invalidate your ideas. That dystopian technology you what-if'ed into existence with a goofy placeholder name is now the most recent startup idea on Product Hunt. That horrible gaffe you thought a politician wouldn't resort to for another 50 years happened yesterday. And with every ridiculous event, every day of terror overseas, every degree of warming, the surreal future you created is reified under fluorescent light. What's worse, reality did it better than you. People were shittier than you could have imagined.

I don't know how I can write speculative fiction without resorting to some cheap MacGuffin or hackneyed plot. Moreover, I don't know how to write speculative fiction.

I was ready to abandon the project altogether when, yesterday, two pieces of media taught me two important lessons.

1.) You're not unoriginal; you're trying to stay afloat

My friend from undergrad co-hosts a hilarious, incisive podcast called Big Soy Naturals. In their most recent episode, they talk about nostalgia and the phenomenon of clinging onto simpler times because to anyone over the age of 25, the present is apparently too overwhelming. While the discussion begins with lighthearted lambasting of people who prematurely call themselves "too old", it quickly shifts to an admission that trends are evolving at breakneck speed, and killing us in the process. It's not about age; it's about greed and diminishing resources driving erratic, impractical growth. We cannot keep up because no one can.

That's no reason to give up on a creative idea. Whatever worldbuilding I have to do is just window dressing anyway; the heart of the story is rooted in humanity and what we do in the face of apathy. While I want to write something believable, I shouldn't surrender to this incessant coolhunt, trying to get ahead of how ridiculous we can be for the sake of originality. I can be mindful of current trends without being led astray.

If you're also trying to write spec fic, I hope you're not bogged down or disheartened. Our imaginations extend far beyond what anyone in Silicon Valley can come up with anyway.

2.) Verisimilitude can change the world too

This lesson comes from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator—the one with the speech against fascism that everyone quotes for the wrong reasons. That speech is at the very end of the film, and is a complete tonal shift from the preceding two hours. Leading up to that moment is a brilliant satire of self-interest, greed and ego, filled with little point-and-laugh moments for viewers both in 1940 and now. If you've ever been obsessed with history between 1914 and 1950, there are a lot of references to the media and weaponry at the time, the mannerisms of different world leaders, and the absurdity of war itself.

It's that latter detail that struck me. Chaplin set out to satirize war as a means of calling for peace. He didn't add anything new or original; all the character and country names are just goofy imitations of the real thing, and he trusts the audience to cop on (e.g., I bet you can guess who "Benzino Napaloni, dictator of Bacteria" is supposed to be). And that's not a criticism at all. The film didn't need to be original because the world was already brutally, tragically ridiculous.

What do you do? Expose it, comment on it but don't get sucked in. Reel the audience in with laughter then strike them with your message. Spec fic can become trite if it strives to be wholly original, builds the shell of a world but deprives it of substance. And I understand now how I almost fell into that trap.

So I don't know how to write spec-fic, but I know what to avoid, and I know what I want to say. Everything else is noise, and I can choose when to tune in as I write.