Your big storytelling breakthrough will come from the connections you see but no one else does.

It can be really really hard to see our world clearly.

To peel off the blinders of what we've been told and what we've been taught. To understand how deep our ignorance goes, how much we've been hindered by the legacies of history.

But fiction gives us that gift. Especially genre fiction.

Most of us were handed a map of the stars with the dots already connected. We were raised to see certain figures in the sky, to follow specific constellations.

But speculative fiction wipes the slate clean, takes away the connected dots so people can see the stars in new ways - and then lets us connect the dots for people, give them new constellations, new maps to follow.

So that they can see, for example, that homeless people aren't unhoused because they're addicts or mentally ill (lots of very wealthy thoroughly housed people are addicts or mentally ill), but because the housing system is set up under capitalism to exclude lots of people.

With my novel Blackfish City, I was writing about a far-future floating city in the Arctic... but I was also writing about New York City now (and it was super obvious; when the book club of an urban planning think tank read the book and I joined the discussion, every one of them clocked what I was up to - right down to the specific politicians and players I was riffing on).

The story I was writing was about an overcrowded future hellhole where people struggle to find safe affordable housing because of rising sea levels and climate change and global conflicts displacing billions... but the story I was telling was about all of the current overcrowded hellholes where displacement and oppression and inequality and climate change are already making billions struggle to find safe affordable housing.

Many of my favorite SFF novels have worked on precisely this principle. Way before X-Men, Octavia Butler's Mind of my Mind used humans with supernatural abilities to tell a story of marginalized communities resisting their oppressors. Samuel Delany's Dhalgren used an impossible future city where the laws of physics have stopped working (and there are two moons) to talk about the magical and the monstrous aspects of living in a big city. Never Let Me Go tells a ridiculous story about grimy impoverished cheaply made clones who passively accept their horrific brutal exploitation... to talk about how so many of us passively accept our horrific brutal exploitation.

What are the connections that you see, but no one else does?

That is where your next big breakthrough as a writer will come from. The dots that only you can connect.

The challenge here is - we don't always know when we're alone in seeing something, or that our opinions and feelings and understanding of the world is uncommon.

That's why I think it's important for us as artists in a time of apocalypse to take the time to listen to the feelings we're taught to be ashamed of. Our rage, our grief, our frustration. From day to day, what is making you furious? What issues make you the saddest?

And then dig deeper. Pay attention to the conversations around those issues. And see - what isn't being said? What hot takes aren't being tweeted? What perspectives are totally absent from the mainstream narrative?

I'm not saying it needs to be a completely original and innovative insight that you and you alone possess. When I wrote my novel The Art of Starving, the central idea - that starving yourself can awaken latent superpowers - was rooted in a phenomenon that many eating disorder survivors like myself have reported: the feeling of great power that comes from completely controlling your diet and your body. But this connection was not clear to folks outside the community, and it was the novel that FINALLY sold, and became my debut, after six previous novels died in darkness, because it was making a connection that was fresh and compelling to mainstream narratives.

What are the perspectives and connections that are clear as day to folks in your community - however you define community - by place, by race, by identity, by religion, by passion or interest or fandom or activism?

And what are the stories you can spin from those connections?

Because that's where your next big breakthrough is waiting.