4 Tips for Writing a Dystopian Fiction Novel

Dystopian fiction explores the antithesis of a utopian society. While utopias are an author’s vision of an ideal fictional world, dystopias are societies in cataclysmic decline, with characters who battle environmental ruin, technological control, and government oppression. Other common dystopian themes include survival, religious takeover, loss of individualism, and post-apocalyptic worlds. Some examples of dystopian literature include Brave New World by Aldous Huxley—which explores what happens when people lose their sense of self when wrapped up in advancing technology—and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—which depicts the dangers of mass media, censorship, and trying to erase history.

Dystopian novels often have foreboding themes. If you’re writing dystopian fiction or are brainstorming dystopian story ideas, the following tips may help:

1. 1. Make your world believable. Dystopian literature is strongest when it feels like it hits close to home. The more your dystopian world feels like the real world, the more believable it will be for your audience. That doesn’t mean it cannot include creatures or various science fiction elements—but there must be an element of familiarity or relatability that connects your readers with this world. Worldbuilding is a good way to set up the components of your alternate reality that will ultimately affect how your main characters exist and survive.
2. 2. Create a backstory. Dystopian futures are bleak and uncertain, but how did they get that way? What was the first foreshadowing of things to come in your dystopian story? What was the turning point in your world’s history? When did the inhabitants of your world lose hope or stop fighting back? In George Orwell’s 1984, a world war divides the entire world into three superstates, with the fictional dictator Big Brother enforcing omnipresent surveillance of all surviving inhabitants, including their thoughts. You should know how your dystopian setting came to be in order to better figure out how it works.
3. 3. Determine who is in power. Who is the leader of your dystopian scenario? How did they usurp or increase their control? Who benefits under this reign? Who suffers the most? Power dynamics are often at the center of many dystopian novels. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, women in the United States are oppressed by a religious government, with fertile women enslaved for their reproductive abilities. In Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young adult trilogy, The Hunger Games, children are forced to participate in an annual deathmatch against one another as punishment for a failed coup against the totalitarian government. The system in control will often provide the most conflict for your protagonists, so it is important to figure out who is in power and what they are capable of.
4. 4. Read dystopian fiction. Get into the mindset of your dystopian world by studying the ones that have come before it. For example, if you’re looking to feature a protagonist against the world, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange or Veronica Roth’s Divergent are two different examples of dystopian stories that focus on characters who cannot or will not conform to the norms of society (for better or for worse). See how other authors form their worlds and create their characters; pay attention to how those two elements cause tension between one another while also pushing the narrative along.

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