In middle school, I took a stab at writing my first novel, vaguely postapocalyptic sci-fi. This was 2011, when dystopias like The Hunger Games dominated the market. Though I was enamored by the trend, I found outlining the practical parts of my apocalypse—Who dropped the nukes? What powered the surveillance cameras?—rather tedious.
I never finished that manuscript. In fact, for a few years, I turned away from writing fantasy and sci-fi completely. Leave speculative spaces to the authors willing to create their own Silmarillions, I figured. I just wasn’t cut out for the game.
As I got older, I started reading like a writer, paying attention to how my favorite speculative authors designed their fictional worlds. To my surprise, the settings I found most compelling weren’t those with lengthy political histories or detailed economics of rocket fuel. Instead, they seemed to draw from carefully placed smoke and mirrors.