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Great Speculative Fiction Isn’t Magic. It’s Craft. (and you can learn it)
From Kevin Elliott, author of Lightmaker and speaker at WorldCon, FantasyCon and EasterCon.
Learning to write well is a challenge…
Your world is clear in your mind. But everything goes woolly when you write about it.
Your story needs to explain new technology or magic, but how can you do that without bogging your story down?
The characters aren’t much more than tour guides.
And you can’t see how to fit a gripping story into the intricate world you’ve built.
Our bookshelves are crammed with ‘how-to’ books on creative writing, but most don’t touch fantasy or science fiction.
That’s why I built the ‘Writer’s Secret Toolkit’. This is where I share everything I’ve learned.
Four Ways Forward
Essential resources for your writing journey
Your story deserves the best possible setting
Create five foundation documents to breathe life into your world
Write action scenes your readers will devour
A 5-step template for engineering gripping scenes readers will love
For unforgettable characters
A system to create mesmerising characters to take your reader’s breath away.
Show your heart in your writing
Give your stories a voice AI can’t match. A voice to keep your readers turning the page.
Special Offer: All four guides for $49 (around £35)
Why This Toolkit Exists
I learnt writing the hard way. Through practice. Yes, I worked through several creative writing books, and took courses, and received professional feedback.
But most of my learning came through trying to write. Going wrong a thousand times, and learning what didn’t work.
I surrounded myself with talented writers. Writers with extraordinary ideas. Worlds nobody had imagined, characters nobody had met, and stories that deserved to exist.
I spoke at WorldCon, FantasyCon, and EasterCon. I ran workshops, and sat in critique groups. I kept learning.
And I kept seeing the same issue.
These writers struggled to get those stories and ideas onto the page.
Not because they lacked talent. But because there wasn’t a one-stop-shop to show how speculative fiction works. The skills they needed were scattered across a hundred different books, and online courses, and a thousand minds.
And only a handful of those sources were wired for science fiction and fantasy.
So I built the toolkit I wished had existed when I started.
Tools that solved the problems I’d seen. Problems like developing characters that work inside our wonderful worlds. Or how to describe your world so it arrives clearly in your reader’s mind.
Every guide in this series distils years of trial and error into a practical system. Something that works for speculative fiction.
Not romance, not thrillers, and not literature.
This isn’t theory.
It’s what I’ve learned, the hard way, from fifteen years of writing and teaching speculative fiction.
What other writers say…
Kevin’s feedback has been invaluable throughout my writing process. He is excellent at giving constructive feedback. He has a wonderful ability to see what will make my work sharper.
Kevin has an amazing knack for giving comprehensive feedback. His points are always well-articulated, and he will gladly and generously share his point of view with writers of all types and levels of experience.
“Kevin’s feedback is very constructive and helpful and opened my eyes to the rhythm and structure of my work.”
Kevin’s feedback is consistently clear and instructive.
He always reads closely and attentively, and has an abundance of ideas on how to polish up a draft to be the best it can be.’
Kevin’s particularly adept at providing measured, constructive feedback on plot structure, continuity, and realistic exposition. His comments on dialogue and language are incisive, and have improved my prose for the better.
Kevin is full of insightful writing tips explained clearly.
Years ago I heard him say that good characters aren’t about likeability, they’re about relatability, and I think about that often.
And when you’re ready to take on more…
The Flagship Course covers the A-Z of writing excellent speculative fiction.
Everything you need to write speculative fiction that works. In one place, and without any fluff.
The Blueprints tackle specific problems. The Writer’s Secret Toolkit Course tackles everything else.
This is a complete, structured journey through the craft of speculative fiction. It’s built for writers with a little experience under their belt. Writers who are ready to stop guessing, and start writing with genuine confidence and skill.
It’s not a collection of loosely connected tips.
And it’s not a list of warm and fuzzy platitudes.
It’s a single, coherent course that takes you through every layer of the craft, in the order that makes sense.
- Characters who feel so real they start making their own decisions
- Plot structures that work with the specific demands of science fiction and fantasy
- Worldbuilding that breathes life into your story rather than suffocating it
- A voice that’s unmistakably yours, on every page
- Dialogue, action, and scene construction that keep readers turning pages
- The business of writing. How to finish, revise, and take your work into the world
From the Blog
Craft, reading, writing life, and the honest reality of building stories in speculative fiction.
A few times a month, I write about something that’s on my mind — a craft problem I’ve been working through, a book that stopped me in my tracks, a moment from the Lightmaker sequel that taught me something I didn’t expect. If you’re interested in the reality of writing speculative fiction rather than just the theory, this is where that conversation lives.
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