Gardner offers advice for aspiring sci-fi writers

Lisa Timpf

Advocate Contributor

Simcoe Composite School alumnus Jim Garder (who writes as James Alan Gardner) was recently inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association Hall of Fame.

We caught up with Jim to ask him what advice he has for aspiring science fiction writers. He generously provided the following suggestions:

Read a lot: Get lots of input. 

Write a lot: Make lots of output.

Read widely: Many genres (not just science fiction or fantasy), from diverse sources (different types of writers from different cultures/subcultures), both fiction and nonfiction.

Science fiction writers in particular should keep up with developments in science, because science is an ever-expanding source of cool ideas. Writers should also familiarize themselves with history, geography, mythology and folklore… pretty much anything. The great SF writer Samuel R. Delany says you can never write anything better than the best thing you’ve read in the past four months.

Visit the library: Go to the library often; max out your library card. Take out anything that catches your eye - the books are free. If you take a book home and after a quick flip through the pages, you find it doesn’t interest you, take it back. No problem. 

If you take out 20 books and only one gives you something you wouldn’t have found otherwise, you’re still ahead of the game. If you only read books that you buy, you’re going to play things safe, and that narrows your world.

Write expansively: In different places and times, using different methods. At a computer or longhand, full sentences or point-form, fast or slow. Keep some kind of notebook; “I always carry a few blank index cards in my back pocket so I can write down any ideas or phrases that come to me when I’m not writing.”

Finish stories: Make sure to make finished stories fairly often. You don’t have to finish every story you start, but it’s easy to get into a cycle of "Start a story, give up when you run into problems, start another story."  Writing consists of a set of skills that you have to practice… and one of those skills is learning how to keep going when a story gets messy. Writers learn to finish what they write.