Starter Pack for Science Fiction Writers (and others)

Six of us were talking about this at Arisia 2020. We came up with a number of tips and tricks. Maybe there's something for you here?

Starter Pack for Science Fiction Writers
Compiled by Laurence Brothers, Michael A. Burstein, Andrea Hairston, Kevin McLaughlin, Sarah Smith, W.J.B. Williams, for Arisia 2020
 
What's the most important part of the book for you?
  • Beginning
  • End
  • Middle
 
What's the most difficult part of the book for you?  How do you address that?
  • Beginning
  • Middle
  • End
  • “It’s easy to write it the right way. Write it all the wrong ways first.”
 
What specific tools do you use (beta readers, software, particular research sites...)?
  • Scrivener. Various people use it various ways: as a research organizer, outliner, writing tool, and a tool for producing print and digital books. www.literatureandlatte.com
  • Google Docs for the immortal revision history and the simplicity and reliability of the tool. (Word is the standard for submission)
  • Airtable—database that you can do anything with. Free until you do a fairly large database. Works on your phone too. Keep track of those book details, and organize them. www.airtable.com
  • Scapple—by the folks who bring you Scrivener. Infinitely expandable whiteboard to draw and edit on. Only $14.95. www.literatureandlatte.com
  • A camera/smartphone and a notebook. All the time. And a penknife, a chocolate bar, duct tape, and a sword
  • Coffee. (And for some of us, it really is true that more work gets done in cafés)
  • And, for those pandemic years without cafes, put some kind of soothing background noise on. My personal favorite: Cat Trumpet's 12-hour fireplace video on YouTube. I stare at that puppy for ten seconds and I'm all comfy and happy and I want to curl up and write
  • Research. “Do enough research…not too much. Don’t cat-wax.” “But do do enough.” “Do your own if you can spare the time—someone else may not recognize the detail that sets off your imagination”
  • A text file, a folder full of bookmarks, and a shelf of books. Successful research is like successful teaching. As long as you know more than your readers care about, you’re good. (But Heaven help you if you do a Civil War historical novel and get the details of a battle wrong, because People Will Write You.) The right few arcane details will go a long way
  • Use special words, or special usages of words, to give your world color. Swear words are particularly useful here. Don’t just rename things, though; change them
  • Hemingwayapp.com – helps simplify your writing. Free if online; you can buy a downloadable version for $19.95
  • Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, Affinity Publisher--$49.95 alternatives to Adobe PhotoShop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Powerful, easy to use, comparable to the Adobe products but much less expensive. Use for covers and professional-level book formatting
  • Pinterest for picture boards
  • Read aloud to get a sense of how your work sounds
  • Read to other people to see when they glaze over
  • If you have an ear, use accents to differentiate among characters
  • Google Keep or Evernote for note-taking from online sources
  • Beta readers
  • Codex contests. These contests offer ratings and brief comments, which are very useful in pinpointing problem areas in a story. [Codex is an online organization of neopro SFF writers. To join you must have attended one of the better SFF workshops, or else must have at least one "pro-scale" story sale in a leading magazine.]
  • Workshops: Viable Paradise, Odyssey, Clarion, sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com
  • For research, Wikipedia is a great starting spot, and for simple questions it can often be an end to research as well. But for a historical novel or a book heavily involved with technical details, you need real books on the subject
  • Experts. Know a lot before you talk to them. The more you know, the more they’ll tell you. The magic words are “I’m a writer…” and people will show-and-tell you amazing things. For Chasing Shakespeares, I got an individual conducted tour through parts of Westminster Abbey that people don't generally see, because I'd done my homework
  • Dropbox, iDrive, OneDrive, someplace to make sure you’ve backed up
  • Urban Dictionary and other specialized dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary, The Sailor’s Lexicon, Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
  • For the history and usage of particular words, Google Books Ngram Viewer https://books.google.com/ngrams#
  • Google Books, Internet Archive for out-of-copyright books
  • Jeffrey Carver’s excellent and thorough Web site on writing SF http://www.writesf.com
  • 20booksto50K.com
  • Read everything
 
Useful craft books (and things)
  • Henning Nelms, Magic and Showmanship. The best book ever written about the psychology of entertainment. Once, on a panel of bestselling novelists, every single panelist listed Magic and Showmanship as one of their major influences
  • The Courage to Write, by Ralph Keyes. Fiction writers sit in an empty room and tell lies to strangers. And we wonder why we doubt ourselves
  • Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Combination card game and creativity tool, now widely available in app form
  • Steering the Craft by Ursula K Le Guin. Beautifully written. Focuses mostly on low-level things like sentence construction, point of view, and so on. Useful exercises. Good for beginners, still useful for more advanced students
  • The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. A bit dated, annoying professorial voice, but has some excellent high-level advice not found in most other books on writing
  • About Writing by Samuel Delany. Some brilliant material mixed in with curmudgeonly attempts to convince you not to be a writer. Not for the faint of heart
  • The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives by Lajos Egri
  • Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee
 
 
One weird technique that's worked for you?
  • “Owl and lamb”: Take two disparate ideas or things, like an owl and a lamb. Combine them and you have something offbeat, interesting. It may fly
  • If characters won’t do what you want them to do, make them sit in a white, boring room with no windows and uncomfortable folding chairs until they tell you what they want to do. Write down their dialog
  • Write an imaginary dinner party and invite all your characters. Get to know them
 
What turns you on or off about SF written by other people?
  • Bad beginnings
  • Bad endings
  • Awful sentences
  • In historical fiction especially, wording like “gifted X with Y” and “tasked Z with A”. “Normalcy.” Use the Oxford English Dictionary to determine the first use of words. Use Google Ngram to see relative usages
  • Everybody sounding alike
  • Technological innovations that aren’t thought through. For example, say you casually deploy antigravity for your vehicles, or you have high-power fusion reactors on your spaceships. The consequences of antigravity or free energy on society are colossal. If all you do with it is have cars and bikes without wheels, you're not writing SF at all, you're just using SFnal decorations.
  • Clumsy prose, flimsy characters, foolish motivations, plot twists forced for the sake of the reveal
  • Readers will suspend their disbelief for all kinds of crazy premises, but mess with their common sense understanding of reality, or the rules you've established, and you've lost them. If you say January 6, 2021, was a Saturday, and your reader is reading it on January 6, 2021, a Wednesday, you’ve lost them.