What We Leave Out: The Art of Science-Fiction Writing

Scientific experimentation is as much about what we choose not to study as what we do—researchers must always ignore some elements of a problem to focus on others.

Similarly, writing is a process of taking out as much as putting in, of deciding what we can include and what we must leave untouched. Writers who work with the future tend to care most about a particular aspect—about changes in technology, society or the environment.

Panelists Anna North, Carl Schoonover and Lawrence Wechsler discuss the ways writers fashion a future by whittling down an infinity of possibilities until that which most interests them remains. Join them as they shed light on the processes of writing and experimentation and how the eventual results are only part of the story.

Brief Bios

Anna North graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2009, where she received a Teaching-Writing Fellowship and a Michener/Copernicus Society Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, where it was nominated for a National Magazine Award. She is a staff writer for Jezebel.com.

Carl Schoonover is a neuroscience PhD candidate and National Science Foundation graduate fellow at Columbia University and the author of Portraits of the Mind. He has written for The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Science Magazine, Scientific American and cofounded NeuWrite, a collaborative working group for scientists, writers and those in between. He hosts a radio show on WKCR 89.9FM, which focuses on opera and classical music and their relationship to the brain.

Lawrence Weschler was a staff writer at The New Yorker for over 20 years, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was also a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award (1998). He is currently director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, where he has been a fellow since 1991 and from which base he is trying to start his own semiannual journal of writing and visual culture, Omnivore. He is the artistic director emeritus (still actively engaged) with the Chicago Humanities Festival.  He is also a contributing editor to McSweeney’s, the Threepeeny Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review; curator at large of the DVD quarterly Wholphin; (recently retired) chair of the Sundance (formerly Soros) Documentary Film Fund; and director of the Ernst Toch Society, dedicated to the promulgation of the music of his grandfather, the noted Weimar émigré composer.