July 2, 2022

To me, speculative fiction is all about "What if?" I venture to say, all writing begins with this postulation. But the speculations within a story premise are what lie at the heart of fantasy, science-fiction, or what have you.

The formulation for my current project, Rite, came about with the question: What if a young son witnessed his father commit a horrific act of violence against another person? Now, anytime I get an idea, I immediately try to find the path less taken; how can I avoid a pedestrian tale. Well, in this case, don't make the father an ex-hitman trying to leave that previous life behind, or a soldier with PTSD. Don't give him a history of being bullied, a victim harboring vengeance. Don't have him be serial killer.

Wouldn't it be more interesting if the father were a common man, with no history of aggressive behavior? Yet, something would have to be buried within him. Perhaps cowardice and self-loathing? It's questions like these that spark a domino-effect of further questions that lead to answers that eventually become a storyline. (I won't go into all the plot details; it would make for a Tolstoy-esque journal entry that might crash your computer.)

With all that, I've now given myself a new challenge, a new question to answer, right? How do I fit this idea into the genre of speculative fiction? Next month, I'll try and give some insight into what I've come up with.

Gordon Gravley

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