How to Publish Your Science Fiction Story: A Step by Step Guide

This is Part 1 of a 3 Part Article

Want to publish your science fiction story? Then follow this step by step guide to becoming published.

Step 1: Write a Story

Or two. It always helps to have more than one piece in the oven. The important thing is to write a complete story: beginning, middle, and end. Remember this is science fiction. Readers are open to new things, but they want your story to have point. No thought pieces.

If you’re not sure what a complete story looks like, read through a few science fiction magazines. You will get the idea. In general, your story should present a character who has a problem. The meat of the story should be how he, she, or it solves this problem. The story should end when the character has worked out the problem. In most cases, you will find that a character changes from the beginning to the end of the story. Dynamic characters are important in science fiction. Avoid stereotypes and cardboard cutout characters. If possible, your protagonist should be strong, possibly heroic.

This is a pretty basic formula, and science fiction writers play around with this quite a bit, but if you read a some stories you will notice they almost always follow this formula in some way or another.

Step 2: Proofread and Edit

Read through your story and look for mistakes in grammar and spelling. Don’t rely on your computer spell-checker and grammar-checker to catch all your mistakes. These programs are not very intelligent and miss plenty of common errors.

Look for places where you have used the passive voice and see if you can’t make it active. It will make your story stronger, and it will cut down on unnecessary words, which is another thing you should be looking for.

Are there words or sentences that aren’t necessary? Delete them. Yes, this is hard. You have spent a great deal of time and effort finding the perfect words, crafting the perfect sentence, but the truth is, not everything you originally wrote is necessary to move the story along. You should have words and sentences that need to be cut. If they are too good to throw away, cut and paste them to a new document. You might be able to use them in another story down the line. The rule of thumb for deleting unnecessary words is that if it doesn’t advance the story in some way, then it needs to go.

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