Patrick Rothfuss will be teaching English 395: Speculative Fiction Writing over the Winterim session at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Rothfuss is a UWSP alum as well as a New York Times best-selling author who became famous with his sci-fi fantasy book “The Name of the Wind.”

Rothfuss wrote for The Pointer during his undergraduate studies at UWSP and agreed to answer some questions for us about the upcoming course he’ll teach, his career and his life:

Have you taught at UWSP before?
Yeah. I taught here for a couple years starting back in 2002. I taught English 101 and 102 and Children’s Literature. But since I only had a master’s degree, I never got to teach a creative writing class.

But then my book got published in 2007. Then it won some awards. Then in 2008 I hit the New York Times bestseller list. Then the book started to get translated into dozens of foreign languages and hit bestseller lists all over the world. So now they’re willing to let me take a crack at creative writing despite the fact that I only have my MA.

Aside from that, I was a writing tutor for over a decade, and I’ve run smaller writing workshops at various conventions all over the country. This is my first chance to teach an entire creative writing course though. There’s only so much you can fit into a two-hour workshop.

I’m looking forward to being able to go into much more detail with a group of students that I’ll be meeting with day after day. It will give us the freedom to discuss things in a much deeper way. We’ll really be able to get down to the real gritty underpinnings of writing, rather than just dealing with the superficial surface stuff.

What will students be working on over the winterim period?

The main focus of the class will be on the craft of writing: Character. tension, how to handle story arc, how to use language. Those are the basics. You need them no matter what genre you’re writing in. No matter if you’re writing a short story or a series of novels.

We’ll also be focusing on some of the particular problems that arise when you’re writing speculative fiction.

A good portion of the class will also deal with the tricks of the trade. There are really two different skill sets an author needs. You need to be able to write, and you need to be able to sell what you write.

As you mentioned, there are some problems that arise when you’re writing speculative fiction—what are some of those problems?
If you set a story in Paris, you can just do research on Paris if you want to add more detail. Same thing with Chicago, or Spain or Plover. But that doesn’t work if you’re writing a fantasy novel set in some other world, or a sci-fi novel set in the future or a Victorian era alternate history novel where the Faerie courts rule England. We can’t just research the worlds where our stories take place. We have to build them.

Even more important than world building is the issue of how to reveal your newly created world to your reader. If you include too much detail, they feel like they’re reading a history book. If you include too little, they don’t understand what’s going on. It’s probably the biggest problem new speculative fiction authors face.

We also have to fight harder to maintain verisimilitude than folks who write most fiction. A good story needs to seem real, but we have to gain that realness. How do you handle descriptions of magic or advanced technology? How do you avoid clichés? How are you going to make your vampire novel different than, BETTER than the thousand crap vampire novels that are already out there?

What first got you into writing?
I was a big reader as a kid. I loved books. One day I thought, “If I could write something like this, that would be really cool.” So I tried to write. Most of it was crap, of course. Whenever you start anything you suck at it. But I got better over the years. By now I’ve learned a lot of tricks, and I’m ready to pass some of them along.