Kickstarter Campaign,  On Writing,  publishing,  workshops

How to Write Spaceships…

Special Class in THE CHASE Kickstarter…

And you only got about 20 hours to get it. Goes away and won’t be offered again after 7 pm West Coast Time.

Most writers I know, especially beginning writers, think they know how to write spaceships. But I see very few who actually do.

Most end up putting a “bridge” in the middle of the ship, or the front of the ship as if spaceships had fronts, and by the time they are done, might as well have Captain Kirk sitting down in the center.

And no setting, no sense of scale, and no clue how to do any of that to make their ships original.

And so many writers think the International Space Station will be normal for its cramped size. Why is it cramped? Because every bit of it had to be lifted out of a pretty major gravity well on very expensive rockets.

So what happens if ships could be built in space? What limits the size? All kinds of factors, including fuel and type of engine and type of materials and the amount of stress on the materials and the configuration of the ship and so on and so on. In essence, a lot of basic physics.

What is required for a spaceship to go into a gravity well?

Does it need Shields if not fighting aliens? Does it need inertial dampeners to keep you from being a spot on a wall. Did the Space Shuttle have either?

And so on and so on. How do you write all that and not bog your story down into a bloody pile of stupid expository lumps?

That is what the special three-week workshop will explain, but on 20 hours left to sign up for it on THE CHASE KICKSTARTER. Not offering it anywhere else.

Below are 16 images of some really cool spaceships in the Diving Universe. They look nothing at all compared to my Seeder’s Universe spaceships. Kris and I know how to write spaceships. It will be a really fun workshop, I promise.

DON’T MISS THIS WORKSHOP… JUST 20 HOURS!!!

THE CHASE KICKSTARTER

 

3 Comments

  • Lloyd MacRae

    Sounds like a class I need. I wrote a 150,000 word sci-fi novel that I haven’t published yet. Working on book 2. I had the brilliant idea of having the aliens using golden, ball-shaped fighter-spaceships. The robots inside are built into seats and could just slide around the interior surface, allowing them to dart around in every direction in an instant. Yeah. Great. Until you begin to realize you are telling the story and having your characters talking about being attacked by the alien’s balls !!! LOL.

  • Danny O'Hanlon

    I still can’t get my head around the value that these Kickstarters that you guys run offer. Even the lowest tier (which is usually all I can afford) usually comes with a class and several books. I’ll even watch the videos geared at genres that I don’t write in, just to get some tips. As a comedy writer, this is really helpful as it gives me plenty of genre background to work with.

    Just out of pure curiosity – you have mentioned a few times that you used to write poetry. Is this published anywhere? I would be interested to read it!

    • dwsmith

      I published a few of my poems in early issues of Smith’s Monthly, then stopped doing that. My poetry is in old literary magazines from the early 1970s. Not literary, but I guess they liked a commercial poem or two. I still write some at times, just never show anyone.