Last Saturday I ran a workshop for a bunch of new and aspiring SF writers on behalf of a great organisation called Spread the Word, at the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. This was the follow up to a previous event last year organised by StW called Guilty Pleasures, which was a panel/workshop day featuring writers of SF, crime, horror and historical romance — ALL IN THE SAME ROOM!

But the brief this time was to explore the potential and craft of SF in a one- day workshop for writers new to or experienced in that genre; and I was pleased to find it was a sell-out.

I began the day by discussing some general concepts of writing that are particularly important for SF — namely worldbuilding and POV.  I read a chapter from Hell Ship, featuring Sharrock, his cathary, and his lost village. And I then read  a section from The Book of the New Sun, a fantasy novel that’s actually SF (although, since it’s Gene Wolfe, that’s never ENTIRELY clear) and which is a masterly example of how to create a world with a detailed geography, culture, and language all its own.

Words are the key in my view; those magic phrases that feel real, yet evoke strangeness. Wolfe’s genius is to use words like ‘autarch’ and ‘fuligin’ and ‘asimi’ which sound invented, but are in fact real words that have fallen out of use, or are utterly arcane.  World building isn’t just about making maps and writing future histories; it’s about the poetry of words that imply as much as they describe.  At the other end of the spectrum, a military SF writer like Dan Abnett has to invent words for GUNS; like the PDW (personal defence weapon) and PAPS and hardbeams and M3A pipers and thumpers, all of which feature in his fab new book Embedded.  If the jargon is right; the world feels real.

I also talked about Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire, which is the masterclass in how to manipulate POV to create great action sequences. And I talked a bit too about Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, which creates a stunningly real near-future world in prose so beautiful you could kiss it.

Then I asked a room full of strangers to create an alien for me …

And in the afternoon session, the writers pitched their own original story ideas — and I found myself immersed in a vast range of weird and wonderful stories, in a room (this was taking place in a museum of medicine based on the collection of an 18th century surgeon) full of skeletons and organs pickled in jars. Utterly surreal, and quite engrossing. I wish all those writers well and have urged them to keep me in touch with what they do.

The highlight of the day for me though was that period in the morning when I was sitting at a desk, doing nothing; surrounded by people passionately arguing about ideas and concepts and characters, as they endeavoured to create their alien.  We ended up with four of them.  A malleable alien, which can change its shape and merge with other aliens to create a larger entity.  A sloth-like reptilian alien with wings.  An alien virus, that can impart the gift of empathy on its human host.  And an alien that feeds on energy that can expand its membranes to become the size of a room; and which is able to float freely in space drinking in the heat from the sun.

Four great aliens!

This day was very much a busman’s holiday for me, because I’ve spent a large part of my career working as a script editor/creative producer and screenwriting tutor.  And I have to admit, there’s no joy quite so special as being there when OTHER people are being creative.

No really, I’m quite serious about that!  A writer’s life is often a very boring  one; it’s all about sitting on your lardy bottom in a room on your own, wrestling with various half-baked thoughts, haunted by a deadline.  But to feel the heat generated from the creative fire of an entire room full of writers — well, if I were a vampire, I’d be immortal from drinking in that energy.