Writing Speculative Fiction
Writing speculative fiction was one of my favourite modules. Speculative fiction is, after all, one of my key interests and will most likely be the main focus of my futures project. The module also helped me solidify the idea that I want to include my own creative writing piece embedded throughout my project.
It really helped my develop my creative writing skills and gave me many techniques for experimenting with and working on my writing. These included idea generation, free writing with a prompt, formulating questions to develop an idea, the use of mind-mapping, and methods of researching. It was really fun to develop a sci-fi idea and world. After writing some paragraphs we also drew the shape of our plot and experimented with different perspectives (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and tenses (present, past). We were also given many tips. My story was based on technological brain implants and what would happen if they turned people into ‘zombies’. This is something I will continue to develop on for the assignment. We also discussed and analysed three different short stories (‘Bloodchild’ by Octavia Butler, ‘Repeating the Past’ by Peter Watts, and ‘Venus in Bloom’ by Lavie Tidhar) and looked at the different ways they had crafted a narrative.
This course really got my creative juices flowing, especially when we were given a talk (and the chance for q&a session) with the author Helen Sedgwick who discussed her various novels, especially The Growing Season and the sci-fi series she is currently working on. This was extremely eye opening and it was really interesting to hear about her process and opinions on writing.
The stories which I read, wrote, and analysed will definitely inform my project and it’s direction.
