But how?
We can’t all be adventurers, but we’ve all experienced life.
Write what you know is a familiar piece of advice. When you think about it, it doesn’t really apply in the way it appears to. If you take it literally, it rules out writing just about anything but your own story. None of us has lived in the past; most of us don’t have heart-stopping careers as secret agents or a continual stream of murders to solve, one after the other. Nor do most of us run from a bad relationship to open a café on the beach!
The way to do it is quite simple.
You have to take the advice to a different level, go beyond the simple meaning. And use what you know to write in your chosen genre.
So, how should I apply it to my chosen genre, Sci-fi?
Obviously, I don’t know from my own experience about life in space or on other planets. But I do know a lot about similar things, right here on Earth. And it all comes from my chosen career, at sea in Merchant vessels. I spent my working life travelling the world, spending time in small, enclosed groups of diverse people and seeing foreign lands, usually the parts that the tourists don’t necessarily find.
This has given me valuable insight into how people function and how different societies worked, long before the days of globalisation.
I know about being stuck with a small bunch of people, miles away from anywhere. I know about the tensions that can develop, how your lives depend on each other and how little problems can become big things, in no time at all.
And I’ve lived with the very real possibility that I wouldn’t be going home.
Insight like that is great for writing emotional dialogue and describing the pressure humans can be under, just by being with other humans.
And, because of that, there’s one more thing that I’m pretty sure of.
When we move away from this planet to explore, to boldly go, if you like, we’ll take all our humanity with us. Our good points and our bad ones. Our emotions and actions will play out on a larger stage.
That’s enough to give me loads of stories. All that’s left for me to do is to adapt them into a Sci-fi setting.
That’s where the fun bit starts, taking what might be an everyday event and putting it in another place. Because there will still be everyday events, even when we’re living on a planet half a Galaxy away. But, as with any ordinary event, there’s often more than one way of looking at it, or a different outcome to the one you might have expected.
Most of my stories start with something that feels familiar. Things that most people have done, like opening a hotel room door or relaxing by the pool on holiday. Deciding to start a new life or getting off a train. It’s what happens next, once I’ve got the reader relaxed and comfortable, that gives me the chance to introduce the universe that I’ve created.
It might be a space station or a trading ship. It could be an airless planet or a tropical paradise. But all my worlds have one thing in common. They’re based on solid science, extrapolated to a possible future. There is nothing in them that isn’t logical or requires a leap of faith to believe in. I like to think it grounds them and makes them easier to accept.
Once I have the setting organised, I can throw in the human element of the story.
I enjoy researching my settings and technology, almost as much as writing the action. I love reading about the science of now and working out how it might evolve in the near or distant future.
The crazy thing is that we already have enough technology to exist in a vast range of hostile conditions. There’s not much difference between being able to survive in a submarine or in a pressurised aircraft and living on an alien planet.
There are just two things missing.
A place to go and a way to get there.
If history teaches us anything, it’s that once a society has discovered something it wants, a way is found to acquire it. Just think about spices, silk or the lure of treasure in distant lands. The desire for them, and the wealth they promised, drove science and technology to develop ways of getting to where these things were, retrieving them and getting back again.
I have a sneaking suspicion that our journey out into space and travel to other worlds will proceed in the same way. To begin with, mankind will spread through the Solar System. Maybe we’ll colonise the Caves of Mars, using it as a base for more exploration. All the while, our gaze will be further afield. Eventually, our telescopes or probes will find an interesting place that seems worth a visit. It might be a perfect new home from an Earth where the climate is out of control, or a place that has the potential to supply us with the raw materials we require to build a new type of machine.
For whatever reason, the desire will drive us to invent a way to get there.
And that’s another story.
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