“[W]hen I process the world, I do it through words.“ —Erin Roberts
On Saturday, May 16, Erin Roberts will teach “Writing Speculative Fiction.” In this generative class, students will learn both the essentials of how characters, plot, setting, and pacing work within speculative fiction, as well as more advanced techniques and tools to bring back to their own writing. Get weird with us!
Erin Roberts tells stories across formats. Her short stories and interactive fiction have appeared in venues including Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, The Dark, and Strange Horizons; she’s given characters a voice in scripts for projects including Forge Your Quest and Zombies Run; and she’s written for more than 40 tabletop roleplaying game projects, including Nebula finalist Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. Along the way, she’s proud to have been named a Diana Jones Emerging Game Designer, attended the Hedgebrook and Storyknife writing residencies, and served as Toastmaster of the 2025 Nebula Awards, among other honors. When not writing, she enjoys talking about the craft, and is one of the co-hosts of the award-winning podcast Writing Excuses.
Here’s what Erin had to share with us:
Who are your earliest influences? What people and books made you a writer?
I have always loved telling stories. I think part of it is just how my mind works. I have aphantasia, which means I can’t visualize anything in my head, so when I process the world, I do it through words. I still have the first book I ever “wrote” at age 3 or 4, which involved 3 animals going through a portal to the land of happiness. So I’ve been a speculative fiction writer from the beginning!
My childhood took that love of storytelling and connected it to reading and writing. As a child, our living room was filled with books, and much of my childhood was centered on reading. For a while, we even lived down the block from a library! So for me, the idea of stories on pages has been in my head from my earliest years. As I grew older, I had a lot of formative storytelling experiences and not always from the best sources – I learned relationship development from the soaps All My Children and One Life to Live, got excited about speculative fiction as a “what if” genre from reading Isaac Asimov’s Nine Tomorrows collection, and learned about unreliable narrators from Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality. I’m not sure any of those are the way I want to write, but they did help me see different versions of what writing could do and be. As for what I still love and has helped shape me as a writer: “The Lottery” and We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson, “Ponies” by Kij Johnson, “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawaii” by Alaya Dawn Johnson, “Sandkings” by George R. R. Martin, “Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu, “Help Me Follow My Sister Into the Land of the Dead” by Carmen Maria Machado, and so so so so many more.
What writing challenges have you faced? What have these challenges taught you about your process?
Writing is always a bit of a challenge in a good way – it’s one of the things I love about it. I’ve always enjoyed solving puzzles and figuring things out, and the joy of nailing down the exact right word to go into a phrase or the perfect line of dialogue for a character gives me the same thrill as any other kind of puzzle.
The more difficult kind of challenge is the disconnect between where you are and where you want your story to be. I think a lot of us encountered this during COVID – an event that massive can change how you are and how you relate to the world around you, and as you change, so do your stories. I have pieces that I was working on at the start of the pandemic and felt only a revision or two away from completing that now feel very distant from the writer I am currently. Unfortunately, that means that when I’ve tried to do that last revision, it just hasn’t worked. My solution to that has been to move on to new stories, but also to take out the older works and re-read them every so often to see if I want to go back to them or if they inspire me in new and different and exciting ways than they used to. There’s always a temptation to mourn the stories you couldn’t write, but I’d rather focus on solving the challenge and puzzle of what I’m writing now.
Finally, there’s the challenge of making time for creativity, which is hard to do in a busy and challenging and fun and distracting world. I love looking outside of myself for resources that help keep me grounded and thinking about who I am and how I create, what my processes are, and if they’re working. It can be easy to fall into routines, and sometimes they’re great, but it’s always good to reexamine. Some of my favorite tools for this? “Structuring Your Life To Support Creativity” by Sandra Tayler, Make Your Art No Matter What by Beth Pickens, and The Creative Comeback by Felicia Pride.
From your perspective, what’s the most rewarding part about being a writer?
Getting to capture a story on the page. I love the moment, in real life, when a great storyteller has finished a really captivating story, and you’re absolutely hooked and feel connected to them and everything they’re telling you. I try to put a lot of that life into my stories – it’s why I often focus a lot on character voice and building worlds that feel real and lived in, because both help the story I’m telling come to life. I also think that writing is a way of sharing a bit of myself and the way I see the world, both in how it works and what it could be.
Who do you write for?
Me, honestly. Are there other folks that I hope will vibe with my stories and enjoy my work? Definitely. But I find that if I write with others in mind, I can let their approval or judgement cloud the connection between my imagination and my (metaphorical) pen, so I write for me – to take an idea I have or a character I’m interested in, and put it down on paper. When it feels like the story could be as real as one in our world and I’ve done justice both to that world and the characters in it, that’s when I feel like I’ve fully nailed it.
What do you hope writers will learn from your course?
If you’ve never written science fiction or fantasy before, this is a great place to start – we’ll be doing exercises that will help you put together a new concept for a world and develop a story that could exist there. If you’re an experienced speculative fiction writer, we’ll be exploring different ways to think about world-building, to connect world to story, and to make speculative stories come alive. I also invite anyone who shows up to share what they want to learn from the course – I’ve taught about many different aspects of speculative fiction, so if there’s something that interests you, I’m happy to address it and probably have some thoughts or an exercise that relate!
—
Thanks, Erin!
Click here to learn more about Erin’s upcoming class.
