How to Write a Speculative Story

A formula for writing publishable speculative short stories--with examples!

Last week’s post was inspired by a bad novel. This week’s post is inspired by a bad short story collection. (I’ve been reading again!)

The stories in this collection were overwritten, underthought, and allegorically flimsy. They went on too long and they had too little to say. Basically the only thing these stories had going for them is that each one had a bombastic speculative premise.

(Quick definition of speculative fiction: it’s an umbrella term for fiction that is not set in our world. Fantasy, sci-fi, fable, dystopia, surrealism, absurdism, near-future, etc.)

I think the bar is lower for speculative fiction than for realism. Speculative fiction has, by default, a high-concept premise, and many editors are willing to overlook a shoddy execution in favor of novelty.

If you’re writing a short story about a troubled marriage, you’re competing against all the millions of stories that have been written in human history about troubled marriages.

If you’re writing a story about a woman who turns into a turtle, you’re competing against: no one. You’re the first to do it.¹

This means that speculative fiction often gets away with things that realism doesn’t. In our hunger for something that’s never been done before, we forget to ask whether this never-been-done-before thing was done well, or whether it was worth doing in the first place.

I say all this as someone who loves speculative fiction, and who has written a lot of it. The first story I published had a speculative concept and a stylistic gimmick to boot, and that story won a Pushcart Prize. Message received, I thought at the time. Write more speculative fiction.

So when I read this underwhelming speculative short story collection, I felt both frustrated and complicit. The writer had clearly generated all these stories from the same basic formula. I recognized the formula, because I’ve often used it myself. To object to this writer’s stories as formulaic, I would have to object to my own too.

I stewed on this for a while, and I tried to write out the formula behind their stories, and the formula behind my stories, and then I reread some speculative stories that I really love, and I decided: Yes, there is a formula for a publishable speculative story. And if you follow the formula closely, you can end up with a story that is not just publishable but good.

Here are the steps:

1. Choose something you feel strongly about.

2. Take it to its logical extremes.

3. Find the character worst equipped to handle this situation.

4. Come up with a side plot.

5. Escalate into absurdity.

6. End at the point of no return.

7. Disprove your original point.

8. Theme it out.

To show this in action, I’m going to walk through these steps one by one, developing a hypothetical short story as I go:

1. Choose something you feel strongly about.

I’m a tennis player. I resent the fact that pickleball players are taking over tennis courts, painting new lines and setting up new nets and crowding us out. I also resent how much time pickleball players spend talking about pickleball, and trying to recruit innocent bystanders to play pickleball.

2. Take it to its logical extremes.

Pickleball is spreading. Tennis courts, parking lots, shopping malls are being converted into pickleball courts. Every time you run into your neighbor, he raises his racket and asks you to come out and play sometime. Your coworkers play pickleball. Your boss plays pickleball. Your wife swears she doesn’t play pickleball, but you find a wiffle ball hidden under her pillow.

You seek out the few places on this green earth where you might be safe, just for a couple hours, from the dreaded pock-pock-pock of pickleball. Your barber says: “I’ve actually just started playing pickleball.” Your favorite coffee shop has renamed all their drinks after pickleball slang. Your tennis friends have gone over to the dark side. You head to a retreat in the mountains where you previously spent a peaceful, unplugged vacation. But when you get there, you find that it’s been converted into a pickleball resort.

3. Find the character worst equipped to handle this situation.

You’re a tennis player. Not just that—you’re a lone wolf. A cynic. You don’t believe in doing things just because everyone else is doing them. When you see a long line of people, you don’t think, “I wonder what they’re waiting for,” you think, “Suckers.” The more people hype up a movie, the less apt you are to go see it. You don’t take friendly advice very well. “Maybe you should come out on the court with us sometime! Don’t judge it till you’ve tried it.” When challenged, you tend to double down. “It seems like your grudge against pickleball is making you unhappy. Maybe you should just let it go?” You’re proud, stubborn, and willing to die on even the smallest of hills.

4. Come up with a side plot.

There must have been something you wanted before this pickleball plague started to take over your life. Something you want to do instead of pickleball. (No, tennis isn’t enough.) Maybe you’re trying to get a promotion. Maybe you’ve got some rivalry with one of your coworkers, who is incensingly just slightly better than you at everything. Your coworker was hired eight months after you were, and yet she’s already been promoted. She’s just closed some major deal, such a coup for the company that the boss throws her a party. You drink champagne and you hate her. We’ll come back to all this.

5. Escalate into absurdity.

This is where the supernatural comes in. Things are turning into pickleball courts that really shouldn’t be. You head up the skyscraper and on every floor, the elevator doors open onto a set of pickleball courts. You take a wrong turn heading home and you find that you’re winding through a maze of pickleball courts. Weren’t you on the highway? As you toss and turn at night, you could swear you hear the faint pock-pock-pock of pickleball, coming from the closet. Your wife’s side of the bed is cold. Come to think of it, when is the last time you saw your wife? You creep out of bed and over to the closet. You edge the door open. You already know what you’re about to see.

6. End at the point of no return.

There are only two ways this story can end.

One: You give in. Your closet door opens onto a pickleball court. There’s your wife, playing pickleball with all your closest friends. Your dead father. Your ex-girlfriend. They’re all there, waiting for you to join them. You pick up a racket. You step into the box.

Two: You make a run for it. You slam the closet door shut and you pack your bags. You take your wife’s car—there’s a mini pickleball racket dangling from the rearview mirror, swinging when you take the turns too wide. You drive at top speed. But when you reach the top of a high cliff, the road is blocked. The police are all there, wearing athleisure, tossing wiffle balls. They’re coming towards you. You close your eyes and you drive off the cliff.

7. Disprove your original point.

Okay, here’s the kicker. The secret to any good speculative story, or really any good story at all. Remember that thing you felt strongly about, way back in Step 1? Well, you’re wrong about it. You’ve always been wrong about it.

So what if the pickleball fad is sweeping the nation? It’s a fun, accessible, not-too-taxing sport that a lot of people enjoy. It gets people into exercise who normally would be sitting on the couch. It’s got a gentle learning curve, so that pretty much anyone can be competitive within ten minutes of picking up a racket. It’s not as exclusive or expensive as tennis. It’s a sport of the people.

Maybe the reason you hate pickleball so much is that you don’t like seeing people take pleasure in something easy. Maybe you think that life should be hard, as hard as tennis always was for you, and you’re bitter that people get to take shortcuts. Maybe you can’t be happy for people. Maybe you’re selfish. Maybe everyone in your life has been holding out their hands to you, hoping you’ll join them, and it’s your fault you’ve ended up alone.

8. Theme it out.

Now that you know what your story’s about, go back through and nudge everything into alignment with the theme. The very first time that you describe a pickleball court, make sure the language implies vast, sweeping, swallowing expanses. The capacity to spread and spread. Plant some early hints about the wife—a conversation at the dinner table where your protagonist starts to vent about pickleball, but the wife stays oddly quiet, neglects to chime in.

Go back to that side plot. Hopefully, if you’ve successfully tapped into your subconscious while writing this story, your side plot already aligns with the theme you figured out in Step 7. The rival coworker—the jealousy—the bitter sipping of the champagne. Maybe the coworker isn’t such a terrible person after all—it’s just that your protagonist can’t be happy for her. Make some adjustments to those scenes to give them a new meaning on a second read. What your protagonist took to be intolerable gloating on the part of the coworker was actually just the coworker being happy. What your protagonist took for a twisting-the-knife snide remark was actually just an invitation to friendship.

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Is this shaping into a good story? Honestly, yeah, I think it is. I don’t think my pickleball diatribe could ever be a great story, but I think if I wrote this out as a proper 3,000-word story, I could maybe get it published somewhere.

So why didn’t I just write the story, instead of turning this into a how-to substack post?

It’s because of Step 7. The magic of writing one of these stories is the slow process of realizing that you were wrong. That whatever strongly held belief you started off with is simplistic, and the world is too complicated to accommodate it. That even the things you hate have something going for them.

I already know that my resentment of pickleball is outsized and uncool. So there’s no real excitement for me in writing this story—I’m not going to be surprised by where the story ends up.

I’m at my best as a writer when I surprise myself, when I disprove my own hypotheses. I think that’s what was missing from the short story collection I mentioned at the start of this post. The writer had all the other steps of the formula down, but they skipped Step 7. Their stories began and ended with the same unassailable beliefs.

I think we should write to convince ourselves, not other people. And I think we should let ourselves fail to be convinced. Good fiction comes from grappling. If you’ve already figured everything out to your satisfaction, write an essay.

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For more examples of what this formula looks like in practice, you can read some of my speculative stories, which follow the above method pretty much to the letter.

They all started with Step 1—something I felt strongly about—and by the end of each of these stories, I disproved my original point:

“If This Reaches You” - It’s okay that I don’t read the news.

“Big Steve” - I feel like such an automaton as a cashier that I might as well be a robot.

“Lisa in the Third Grade” - Kids are surprisingly accepting of otherness.

“Work Experience” - The internships I held in the publishing industry were rigorous, sure, but that was ultimately for my own good.

To Stay, To Stay, To Stay - I followed my gut.

I hope this was helpful—and I’d love to hear how well this maps onto the way you write stories, speculative or no.

Thanks for reading!

1. Not so if you’re writing about a woman turning into a clam, or a woman turning into a dog, or a woman turning into a parakeet. Those have all been done.