Taking the Plunge - Making a Start as a Science Fiction Writer

I’m new to this. Not writing or science fiction, but sharing my work and thoughts with people I don’t know. I won’t call you strangers because you all subscribe to this blog and you all adore science fiction and fantasy. That makes you brethren, and naturally the first people with whom I should share my work.

To give you some background, I am forty-nine, live in Dublin with my wife and son and I have the mental age of a fifteen-year-old. I grew up in a house surrounded by video games and science fiction novels so I never had a chance. Both my parents were prolific writers. My father gave me my love for science fiction and my mother taught me the skills to write it. And so, in my mid-twenties, I took it upon myself to write a science fiction novel. I only had an opening idea, with no plot or story, but I was confident I could get the job done. Published by thirty was the plan. Needless to say, things have not quite worked out that way. The years passed and the elusive manuscript remained stubbornly unfinished.

A lot of this was my fault. I’m very lazy and will allow almost anything distract me from sitting down and creating something out of nothing. I know a lot of authors like to have their plot mapped out before they write a single word. Sadly, I never had that level of organisation or discipline. I had to feel my way through the dark, stumbling over mistakes, hitting dead ends and poor characters. Giving up would have been easy, and yet something nagged at me to finish what I had started. Getting the first draft down was a pivotal moment. It gave me something tangible that I could share with family members and friends. It also provided a canvas for new ideas and improvements. My mother was tremendous. She read multiple drafts of the manuscript and eviscerated swathes of overwriting, transforming the narrative into a compact and disciplined text. She was the auditor of my work, and kept me on the straight and narrow. My best mate, on the other hand, was my ideas man. Like my mother, he read everything I wrote, called me out when I was lazy, encouraged me when I was onto something, nagged me to be more focused and helped me with plot lines, provoking new thoughts and ideas. They say that writing is a lonely business, which is true, but having good people around you is still essential.

With this help I was able to stubbornly grind out a story. When it comes to writing fiction, I don’t believe in talent. The writing gods do not confer upon a favoured individual the means to create a masterpiece in six months. Instead, they make a compact with you. The deal is, you bleed and they slowly give you the means to complete the work. How much and how frequently you sacrifice will determine the extent of their help. If you try to complete the work without bleeding, you are in breach of the agreement, which will be manifest in the quality of your work. My uncle, who is a priest, has an expression which, I feel, captures this concord quite nicely  - ‘the Holy Spirit is found in the inkwell.’ A strange thought, for a science fiction writer, yet I agree with him that once you have bled sufficiently, the Holy Spirit, or some higher power, comes to your aid. How else could plot and characters, which had previously never existed, suddenly come to life? That is not to say that I do not believe in talent. Some people clearly have natural aptitudes over others, but when it comes to writing science fiction or fantasy, I believe that everyone starts in the basement.

So what floor am I on now? Well, I have a manuscript that I think is good. But no one outside my family and a very few friends have read it. I needed to get an honest appraisal from someone who did not know me. I reached out to Temple Dark Books to avail of their manuscript appraisal service. It was invigorating to speak to someone who knew the industry and who could offer brilliant observations and recommendations. They also suggested that I reach out to similar-minded people, to tell my story and share my experience. Hence this blog post, which is the first I have ever drafted. Compared to many of you, my achievements will seem small indeed. Let’s face it, a production rate of one novel every twenty years isn’t great. Brandon Sanderson once said that a writer's first book almost never gets published, and that it is usually around book five or six before an author reaches escape velocity and is launched into the publishing world. At my current production rate, that means I can expect to get published in about a hundred years. That’s something I am going to have to work on. I am also painfully aware that I am a social media troglodyte. I don’t even have a Facebook page. There are many things I need to improve at, and I will share my journey with you along the way.

So you are reading the diary of a hopeful, an unknown and obscure individual with a story to tell. What adventures or pitfalls await? I’ve no idea, but I look forward to us finding out together.

Thank you so much for reading. Until next time.

Pierce Hederman – August 2025.