Let’s start with a little exercise. I want you to take a look around you right now. Look closely. Look outside your window. There’s probably a hoard of vagrants below your window, each of them one talking dog away from murdering you the next time you leave the apartment. Look around your office. I bet IT has installed some new software that seems weirdly aware of your menstrual cycle. Look around the bus. I’ll bet the old man near you sounds like he’s going to cough up something that will take out half the Eastern seaboard.

The point is, you don’t have to look far to see signs of a dystopia. Go to any news website and you’ll easily find stories about how the Earth is quickly becoming unlivable. Or just type in the word Ohio and see what Google gives you. I’ll show you how you can take the world today, add a little sex and archery, and create a smashing dystopian novel on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Before we get started, it might be helpful to look at a few classic examples of dystopias in fiction and analyze why they work so well.

We’ll start with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which is a bit different from your normal dystopia. Instead of the whole world gone bad, here we watch an isolated society of young boys stranded on an island slowly devolve into madness and savagery. This story works because while the situation is extreme, anyone who attended a British school found it very relatable. But it was also a polemic for its time, and was instrumental in convincing the public why abortion should be legal.  

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World imagines a dystopia where the world is highly segregated by class, where people are controlled by meaningless sex and mindless entertainment, and there’s widespread abuse of drugs to make people feel numb and happy. While I don’t feel like this one could ever happen in real life, it’s still vividly realized.

Finally, we have Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Sower. These books start out much like our world. California is a wasteland dominated by violent gangs, jobless migrants and people will almost instantly get killed for venturing out of their homes at night. After her family is killed, our protagonist founds a commune based on a new ideology preaching the importance of change. The only unrealistic thing is the populist authoritarian strongman who rises to power and becomes president, weaponizing hateful rhetoric and the slogan, “Make America Great Again.” That would never happen in real life.

Now let’s see how we can create dystopias as great as these.

Step One: Choose Your Calamity

As I’ve said, if you just watch the news for 10 or 20 minutes, you’ll probably be able to come up with 4 or 5 different ways the world is going to end. Maybe AI took over, everyone lost their jobs and with no labor to practice, Parrothead culture soon becomes the predominant way of life. Maybe scientists go too far, creating a race of super intelligent apes that enslave humanity, like in Planet of the Apes, a movie I never saw the end of. Or maybe a dictatorship rises to power after voters realize the only way to prevent it is to pick a guy who is pretty old. 

As always, it’s good to know your audience. Boomers and Gen Xers lived in constant fear of nuclear apocalypse, so that old gal still packs a punch for them. Millennials hate kids, so something like Children of Men wouldn’t be very effective on them. But they live in constant fear of being deprived of avocado toast, so any type of environmental crisis works great. Gen Z kids have spent their lives with one eye at their mother’s teat and the other on the computer screen, so any society that restricts access to technology will be gangbusters with them.

Step Two: Determine the power players

Dystopias generally come in two flavors: authoritarian and anarchical. But even in the anarchy, the narratives often involve a struggle for power and resources.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a religious regime that has constructed an oppressive patriarchal society. Similarly, my dystopian sci-fi novel The Altar Boy imagines a matriarchal society where men can’t contest the results of a paternity test.

If you go with the anarchy route, have well-defined, competing ideologies. In Stephen King’s The Stand, for example, you’ve got one side who is evil, and another who thinks old black women are magic.

Step Three: Make it Believable

But you don’t have to get too crazy with it. Maybe, like in Fight Club and The Matrix, the dystopia is simply having a stable, well-paying job that is kind of boring. If that sounds a bit too 90s, interview some neighbors who work for Amazon to hear horror stories. And if you don’t have any neighbors like that, don’t worry: you soon will.

However, if reading the news or acknowledging neighbors makes you want to drop a toaster into your bathtub, then draw from your own life. In my aforementioned The Altar Boy, the men in my dystopia were enslaved and forced to procreate for a society of ruling women, and I based this off a series of trips to an underground sex club I took with my first agent.

Step Four: Pick an issue you’re passionate about

Write what you know. Like not smoking in your son’s classroom on parent sharing day, it’s just a rule you can’t get around as a writer.

Choosing a topic that you truly care about will absolutely show in your writing, and vice versa to ones you don’t. For example, I don’t particularly care for animals. In fact, I go out of my way to stomp on ants when I’m walking through the park. So I probably wouldn’t be the best person to write a dystopia about an environmental crisis.

But one thing I do love is wandering through hospitals. I love the hustle and bustle, the inherent drama, the joy that comes with being released, the sorrow of knowing these breaths are the last you’ll ever draw. So pandemic apocalypses were one of my fortes before Covid came along and ruined everything.