This month, I decided to offer a few writing exercises for those of you who want to work on your science fiction stories. This post is especially timely for me, because I’m working on a new novella for a setting that has a lot of different features within it. It’s not a post-apocalyptic setting, but rather one that has elements of religion, politics, breaking technology, alien races, etc.

Here’s one of the exercises from the article:

Create an Alien – Whether you create something that’s humanoid or the size of an amoeba, designing an alien can be a lot of fun and help spark a few story ideas. There are a number of different methods that you can work with to add a bit of chance to the results. One approach you could take would be to write several types of adjectives on small pieces of paper. Toss them in a shoebox and then randomly pull out a string of descriptions. Another method would be to pick an environment, like a Martian desert, and design an alien based on how they’d survive within it. If your goal is to create an alien for a dark fiction setting, you could try creating a cute alien first and then twisting it into something predatory. After you have your creation in hand, you can then explore several different options to flesh out your alien. You could determine how they reproduce, if there are any other types of aliens within that species, what type of pets they might have or food they might eat, etc. — SOURCE: Three Science Fiction Writing Exercises at Apex Book Company

If you’re interested in chiming in, be sure to drop by Apex Book Company and the blog. They’ve also got some great books to put on your summer reading list, too!