Persuasive Writing For A Sci-Fi Audience
Why Sci-Fi Persuasive Writing Breaks The Mold
By definition, persuasive writing requires significant creativity as well as proficiency in basic writing skills. In standard usage, persuasive writing plays a major role to promote products and services via online and offline strategies. As such, well crafted persuasive content can convince people to perform desired actions based upon the goals of the writer.
More often than not, marketers use this writing style to convince potential clients of the benefits associated with the given product or service. Writing work that involves emails, blog posts, booklets, flyers, brochures and articles typically contain this specific style of persuasive flavoring.
Persuasive Writing As A Tool In Science Fiction
How do science fiction, fantasy and horror authors make use of the persuasive writing format?
Look first toward essays and papers designed to promote sci-fi, fantasy and horror as a source for quality reading. In this aspect of persuasive writing we see science fiction as the motivation and the product. It’s all about selling the author, books and short stories. However, if you are thinking that the book sales blurb, also called the sales pitch or the cover copy, is the primary application of promotional sci-fi/fantasy writing, you misunderstand the value of this writing style.
Well-crafted persuasive writing delivers results. And sometimes that result involves selling your reader in the area of suspended disbelief. At it’s core, science fiction writing expands the realm of existing science applications. Yet that expansion may not necessarily apply to the technical or physical sciences. Consider for example Robert A. Heinlein’s epic 1961 science fiction novel, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” wherein moral and culture issues mark the primary focus of the story. It is a deep tale, extremely persuasive in it’s portrayal of human emotional, mental and religious interactions.
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Thus we learn the essence of persuasive writing for a sci-fi audience. It’s about convincing readers to believe in the possibility, and even the likelihood, of the improbable.
Persuasive Writing Style – Things Writers Should Remember
- Accuracy is Mandatory
Although this is common to all the writing styles, you should pay extra attention to the accuracy when writing persuasive content. Accurate grammar is going to be a key feature behind the effectiveness of the really persuasive writing. If you blog down your great science fiction revelation with typos and grammar mistakes, intelligent readers will forsake your premise and your story.
- Be Careful With Creative Words
By nature, some words are stronger than the others in terms of persuasiveness. In fantasy and sci-fi writing, some words are non-existent until created within your book or short story. Be careful in your creativity. And always use words that show rather than tell. You are ordered to provide living characters within a believable situation no matter how unlikely the actual possibilities of such characters and situations may be.
- Think From A Reader’s Science Fiction or Fantasy Viewpoint
Science fiction readers seek new experiences. Although new conceptual ideas are few and far between, sci-fi readers expect and deserve unique treatment of the ideas within your story or book. Consider the current popularity of “The Walking Dead” zombie comic series. The concept of a zombie apocalypse has been worked to the point of death, pun intended. Yet with the right application of persuasive writing for a science fiction audience, this tale rocks on television, dvd, product marketing and the comics.
- Support Your Science With Evidence
In the crafting of sci-fi short stories and novels, details define believably. You cannot prove the existence of space aliens, FTL or even zombies no matter the current popularity thereof. However, you can provide your reader with persuasive characters who face personal complications in a realistic science fiction setting. Select your idea. Create your characters. Craft the details. Provide sufficient information. And then convince the reader that the evidence in your words supports the a reasonable appreciation, suspension of disbelief and sharing.
- Prove Your Story Telling Expertise
Whether writing fantasy, science fiction or mainstream, you must learn and practice the craft of creative writing. Conquer the fine points of spelling and grammar. Spend time studying all the aspects of your idea. Create characters in which you believe. Tell the story in simple but effective terms. Make yourself an expert on:
- What drives the story
- Why it happens
- To whom it happens
- Where it happens
- How it happens
- AND What is necessary to create within your reader a desire to connect with the story.
Understanding the importance of these simple points help you to provide facts about the story in a more reliable manner. This gives your tale credibility. Persuasive science fiction moves the reader into a position of confidence in your skill to entertain.
- Avoid The Dominant Attitude
No one enjoys high-pressure sales. Thus persuasive writing is about persuasion rather than force. In the world of product marketing, the trick centers on pricking the reader/viewers interest in the product. Such is also true in crafting a sci-fi or fantasy story. Never “stage” the events or the reactions of your characters. Rather craft the story a natural flow. Permit the characters to make realistic decisions based upon who they become as the story develops. Thus the reader grows with the characters, responding in their own manner to events just as they come to expect from the characters. Remember: you are not here to force readers into accepting a particular vision from your story. Rather you write a story wherein readers automatically accept, with distaste or with joy, with sadness or with laughter, with sorrow or with pride, the premise, the characters, the motivations and the outcomes.
- Persuasive Science Fiction Writing Is Unique
Successful products and services are promoted as capable of fulfilling a precise purpose in a unique manner. A mop is for cleaning yet every mop commercial presents a sense of uniqueness in this particular mop product. The same is true with automobiles, homes and sci-fi stories.
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In the commercial advertising business, agents strive to prove uniqueness related to the product or the service of which they write. Their goal: Emphasize a couple of exclusive characteristics and then explain how beneficial, attractive and affordable this product can be. Fantasy and science fiction writing carries this same only one of its kind presentation into a much broader scale.
But surprise: Although it does sometimes happen, sci-fi stories are not required to introduce new and never before considered aspects of science, the universe or the atoms in your backyard. Rather, as it is with all writing, good science fiction stories involve great characters facing strange situations perhaps in a different-sort-of-place but always in a unique manner.
Meet these goals, and you will master the art of persuasive writing for a science fiction audience.
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