Let me start with a confession: most advice on writing dystopian fiction is backwards.
I’ve just read two perfectly adequate articles on how to write dystopian fiction. I have shared the links of the article at the end of the post. (Those were top ranking articles on search!)
They tell you to “find a problem in today’s society” and “extrapolate it into the future.”
They suggest you “build a world” and “create dramatic conflict.” They remind you to make your protagonist feel relatable.
This is all true. It’s also useless.
It’s like telling someone to “combine flour, eggs, and sugar” when they ask how to bake it.
Technically correct, but you’ll get a mess if that’s all you know. What these articles miss, and what most writing advice misses, is the why beneath the how.
The invisible architecture that makes dystopian fiction function as literature rather than just a cautionary pile of numb words.
So let me tell you what matters. Not as someone who’s read about dystopian fiction, but as someone who’s lived inside these nightmares for decades and watched one of them become uncomfortably prophetic.
Table of Contents
The Fundamental Truth: Dystopia Isn’t About the Future
Here’s what nobody tells you: dystopian fiction isn’t about predicting what will happen. It’s about illuminating what’s already happening.
For example The Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t inventing horror movies. It was compiling them.
Every single thing in that book, such as the forced childbearing, the public executions, the theft of women’s identities, and the biblical justifications, had already occurred somewhere, at some time, in human history. The author simply asked: “What if it happened here? What if it happened now?”
That’s the trick those articles miss when they tell you to “extrapolate.” You’re not extrapolating; you’re excavating.
You’re digging into the present moment and unearthing the fascisms, the cruelties, the systemic violence that we’ve learned to ignore because they’re not (yet) happening to us.
Ready Player One isn’t about the future of VR. It’s about how we’re already escaping into screens right now.
The Hunger Games isn’t about what might happen to teenagers. It’s about what we’re already doing to them, which is turning their suffering into entertainment, forcing them to compete for scraps while we watch.
So, the first real question isn’t “what problem should I extrapolate?”
It’s “what horror am I already living inside that I’ve stopped seeing?”
What Makes Dystopia Different from Other Fiction
Before we go further, let’s be clear about what dystopian fiction actually is because it’s not just “bad future books.”
Dystopian fiction is political fiction. Period.
It’s fiction where the personal is political and the political is personal. Where individual suffering is always, always a result of systematic choices made by people in power. Where there is no such thing as a purely personal problem because the dystopian state has invaded every intimate space.
This means dystopian fiction makes certain demands that other genres don’t. And these demands are:
1. You must understand power
Not just “bad government” or “evil dictator.” You need to understand how power operates. How it reproduces itself. How it makes itself seem inevitable. How it gets ordinary people to enforce oppression on their neighbors. How it convinces victims that their suffering is natural, deserved, or necessary.
If your dystopia has a cartoonish villain twirling a mustache, you’ve failed. Real oppression is banal. It’s bureaucratic. It’s people just doing their jobs.
2. You must be willing to implicate your reader
Those articles talk about creating “dramatic conflict” with “the protagonist vs. the system.” But they don’t mention that your reader is part of the system. They live in it. They benefit from it. They enable it through inaction.
Good dystopian fiction makes readers uncomfortable not because the future is scary, but because the present is recognizable.
Your job isn’t to let readers feel superior to your benighted characters. It’s to make them realize: Oh God. I’d probably be a collaborator too.
3. You must resist the urge to provide easy answers
This is where most dystopian fiction fails spectacularly. It gives you a plucky protagonist who single-handedly brings down the evil empire, restores justice, and gets a happy ending. This is a lie. This is a dangerous lie because it suggests that systemic oppression can be defeated by individual heroism.
It can’t.
The hardest thing about writing dystopian fiction? Accepting that your story probably won’t, and shouldn’t, end with the system destroyed. Because that’s not how real resistance works.
Real resistance is slow. It’s incremental. It’s people making small choices to preserve their humanity in inhuman circumstances. It’s knowing you probably won’t see the results of your rebellion in your lifetime.
The Seven Mistakes Everyone Makes (And How to Avoid Them)
Now that we’ve established what dystopian fiction is, let’s talk about where writers consistently go wrong.
Mistake #1: Starting with the Spectacle Instead of the Mechanism
The Wrong Approach: “In my world, everyone has to wear shock collars that explode if they disobey!”
The Right Question: “What economic, political, and social conditions would make a population accept shock collars?”
See the difference? One is window dressing. The other is structural analysis.
The most powerful dystopian details aren’t the horrifying punishments. They’re the boring, everyday mechanisms that make the punishments seem reasonable.
In 1984, the truly terrifying thing isn’t the rats in Room 101. It’s the way Newspeak slowly erases the words you need to express dissent. It’s the Two Minutes Hate that gives people a controlled outlet for rage. It’s the way the Party makes you complicit in your own oppression by forcing you to cheer for your chains.
When you’re building your dystopia, don’t ask “what’s the coolest horrifying thing?” Ask: “What are the bureaucratic procedures? What are the social norms? What are the little compromises that make the horror possible?”
Exercise: Take your dystopian premise. Now write a scene where someone fills out a government form. If that scene isn’t chilling, you don’t understand your world yet.
Mistake #2: Creating Incompetent Villains
This one drives me mad.
So many dystopian stories feature totalitarian regimes that are somehow both omnipotent and easily fooled by a teenager with a leather jacket and attitude. These governments can monitor every citizen’s thoughts but can’t spot an obvious rebel brewing right under their noses.
Here’s the truth: Real authoritarian systems are very good at what they do. That’s why they persist.
They don’t maintain power through sheer brutality (though that helps). They maintain power through:
- Co-option: Making resistance seem pointless or dangerous
- Normalization: Making oppression feel inevitable
- Division: Turning victims against each other
- Complicity: Giving people small benefits for participating
Your dystopian government should be terrifyingly competent. If your protagonist is going to resist, they need to be smart, lucky, or (most likely) destined to fail. The reader needs to feel the suffocating intelligence of the system.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Gilead isn’t run by idiots. It’s run by men who understood exactly how to seize power: they created a crisis, offered a solution, and used existing prejudices to make tyranny seem like salvation.
They thought of everything. That’s what makes Offred’s small acts of resistance so meaningful and, most importantly, so fragile.
Mistake #3: Forgetting That Normal Life Continues
One of those articles mentions that you shouldn’t info-dump about your world. Correct. But they don’t tell you why you shouldn’t, or what to do instead.
Here’s why: Because dystopias aren’t non-stop action sequences. They’re societies. People live in them. They fall in love, make jokes, eat breakfast, and worry about their hair. The horror of dystopia is that it becomes normal.
This is something viewers of The Handmaid’s Tale series often miss. They see the Ceremony (the ritualized rape) as the shocking core of the story.
But for the Handmaids, the Ceremony becomes routine. The real horror is how you adapt. How you keep living. How Tuesday follows Monday even in hell.
Your dystopia needs:
- Small joys people cling to
- Boring daily routines
- Humor (yes, even dark humor)
- People who’ve given up
- People who collaborate without thinking of themselves as collaborators
- Moments of beauty that make survival feel possible
The articles tell you to show your world through action. I’m telling you to show it through the mundane. The way people shop for food, the way they greet neighbors, the way they’ve learned not to ask certain questions.
Exercise: Write a scene where your protagonist goes grocery shopping in your dystopia. What’s on the shelves? What’s missing? What do people talk about in line? What do they carefully not talk about? If this scene doesn’t reveal your world’s power structures, rewrite it.
Mistake #4: Making Your Protagonist Special
Oh, this one. The Chosen One. The girl with rare immunity to the loyalty chips. The boy whose DNA makes him special. The teen who was “born different.”
Stop it.
This is the opposite of what dystopian fiction should do. Dystopian fiction is about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. It’s about how anyone could be the victim and how anyone could be the perpetrator.
The moment you make your protagonist biologically or mystically special, you’ve given your reader an out. They can think: “Well, I’m not special like that, so this doesn’t apply to me.” You’ve let them off the hook.
Katniss Everdeen works because she’s not special. She’s simply someone who volunteered to save her sister, something any decent person might do.
Winston Smith works because he’s a mediocre bureaucrat nursing private rebellious thoughts. Again, that’s something most of us do. Offred works because she’s someone who had a normal life ripped away—something that could happen to anyone.
Your protagonist should be special only in their choices, not their DNA.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: your protagonist’s choices might not be heroic. They might be the minimum requirement to stay human. That’s okay. That’s more honest and relatable.
Mistake #5: Explaining Too Much
Those articles mention avoiding info-dumps. Good. But they don’t explain the deeper principle:
Your world should feel lived-in, not lectured.
In weak dystopian fiction, characters explain their world to each other. “As you know, Bob, ever since the Great Collapse of 2087, we’ve had to ration oxygen…”
Nobody talks like this. Nobody thinks like this.
Here’s the technique: Your narrator and characters should take their world completely for granted. They shouldn’t explain it because they don’t need to. It’s normal for them. The reader pieces it together through context, confusion, and careful observation.
Look at how Orwell introduces us to 1984. He doesn’t explain “telescreens” or “Big Brother” upfront. He shows Winston irritated by the telescreen in his flat, trying to find an angle where it can’t see him. We infer what it is from how he relates to it.
In Gilead, Atwood didn’t explain the color-coding of women’s robes in paragraph one. She let Offred notice a Martha in green, an Econowife in stripes, another Handmaid in red.
The reader slowly realizes that this is a society that marks people by function, like livestock. That realization is more powerful than any explanation.
The rule: Characters shouldn’t explain their world. They should bump up against its constraints.
Mistake #6: Forgetting About Class
Here’s something those articles forget to mention and it’s so important. Those articles didn’t mention that dystopias are almost always about class warfare.
The Hunger Games isn’t really about reality TV or teen romance. It’s about the rich Capitol literally consuming the labor and lives of the poor Districts.
Brave New World isn’t about drugs or promiscuity. It’s about a genetic caste system that breeds humans for specific economic roles.
Your dystopia needs to answer: Who benefits? Because someone always benefits.
Dystopias don’t arise from pure evil or incompetence. They arise because some groups of people found that oppression was profitable, convenient, or ideologically satisfying. Your job is to show the economy of oppression.
Ask yourself:
- Who has power in my dystopia, and how did they get it?
- What resources are being extracted, and who profits?
- Who does the dirty work, and who pretends not to notice?
- What class collaborates with the regime because they get crumbs from the table?
- What does “safety” or “prosperity” mean for different classes?
The articles tell you to create “dramatic conflict.” But the deepest conflict in dystopian fiction isn’t protagonist vs. villain.
It’s the conflict between classes and the conflict within individuals torn between survival and resistance.
Mistake #7: Believing in Neat Endings
I said this earlier, but it bears repeating with more detail.
The articles mention that dystopian endings can be “happy or sad” but should be “believable.” They suggest that YA needs hopeful endings while adult fiction can be bleaker.
This misses the point entirely.
The real question isn’t “happy or sad.” It’s “honest or dishonest.”
1984 ends with Winston loving Big Brother. Is this sad? Yes. Is it also honest? Absolutely!
Because totalitarianism doesn’t just kill you, it turns you into a collaborator in your own erasure.
The Handmaid’s Tale ends ambiguously. Offred escapes into either freedom or death. And we don’t know which. Decades later, we discover through historical documents that Gilead eventually fell. Is this happy? Not really.
The historians studying Gilead’s records are making jokes, treating atrocities as academic curiosities. The women who suffered are footnotes.
Here’s what I learned: The point of dystopian fiction isn’t to provide catharsis. It’s to provide warning. And warnings don’t come with reassurance.
Your ending should feel inevitable given everything you’ve shown us about your world. If your protagonist single-handedly topples the regime, ask yourself: would that be possible? Or are you giving your reader a comforting fantasy?
The most honest dystopian endings often involve:
- Small personal victories within larger systematic failure
- Survival without triumph
- Hope that’s hard-won and uncertain
- The implication that resistance continues, even if we don’t see its conclusion
- The suggestion that another dystopia might simply replace this one
Think about Lord of the Flies. The boys are “rescued” by a naval officer… from a ship engaged in nuclear war. They’ve escaped one dystopia only to return to the larger one. That’s honest. That’s how it works.
What the Articles Get Right (And How to Do It Better)
Those articles aren’t wrong about the basics. But let me add the nuance they’re missing.
“Start with a Problem in Today’s Society”
What they mean: Pick a current issue and make it worse.
What they should mean: Find the wound that nobody wants to look at. Not “social media is bad” (too obvious). Not “climate change is scary” (too abstract). Find the specific mechanism of suffering that we’ve normalized.
For me with The Handmaid’s Tale, it was: women’s bodies are already controlled by law, religion, and medicine. We just pretend they’re not. What if we stopped pretending?
Better exercise: Don’t ask “what problems do I see in society?” Ask: “What injustice am I complicit in? What suffering do I benefit from? What would I lose if I fought against it?”
Write that dystopia. The one that implicates you.
“Extrapolate Into the Future”
What they mean: Make the problem bigger.
What they should mean: Remove the barriers that currently prevent the worst-case scenario. Not “make it more extreme,” but “show what happens when the guardrails fail.”
What’s stopping your current society from becoming your dystopia? Is it laws? Remove them. Is it public opinion? Shift it. Is it economic stability? Collapse it. Is it a free press? Shut it down.
Then ask: how would this happen in reality? Gradually? Through crisis? Through democratic vote?
The most chilling dystopias show us that tyranny doesn’t require a coup. It requires our permission, our exhaustion, our desire for simple solutions to complex problems.
“Build Your World”
What they mean: Create interesting details about your setting.
What they should mean: Understand the systems—political, economic, social—that make your dystopia function day-to-day.
Don’t just know what your dystopia looks like. Know:
- What’s the official unemployment rate and what’s the real one?
- How do people get food? Housing? Healthcare?
- What’s illegal to say, and how is this enforced?
- What do people do for entertainment, and who controls it?
- How do people date, marry, raise children?
- What do they believe in (or pretending to believe in)?
- What questions are so dangerous that even dissidents don’t ask them?
The test: If I dropped your protagonist into an ordinary Tuesday in your dystopia, could they navigate it without your help? If not, you don’t know your world well enough.
“Create Compelling Characters”
What they mean: Make them relatable and give them goals.
What they should mean: Make them complicit.
The most interesting characters in dystopian fiction aren’t rebels. They’re people trying to survive with their humanity intact while making daily compromises with evil.
Your protagonist should:
- Want to resist but be afraid
- Collaborate in small ways while resenting it
- Judge others for collaborating while doing the same
- Have moments of cowardice they’re ashamed of
- Make choices they regret but can’t undo
- Try to maintain normalcy in abnormal circumstances
The uncomfortable truth: Most of us, in real dystopia, would not be brave. We’d be the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale doing what we’re told, keeping our heads down, stealing small moments of dignity, and hating ourselves for our cowardice.
Write that character. Then force them to decide: at what point does survival cost more than it’s worth?
The Techniques They Don’t Teach You
Alright. We’ve covered what not to do. Now let me give you the craft techniques I use. These ones don’t make it into those tidy listicles of reddit, tumblr, or google search.
Technique #1: The Banality of Atrocity
What it is: Describing horror in mundane, bureaucratic language.
Why it works: It shows how oppression becomes routine. How humans adapt to anything. How the unspeakable becomes speakable through euphemism.
Example: In The Handmaid’s Tale, the ritualized rape isn’t called rape. It’s called “the Ceremony.” It happens while everyone’s fully dressed. It’s described in passive, clinical language. This is more disturbing than graphic violence because it shows how horror gets domesticated.
How to use it: Take the worst thing in your dystopia. Now describe it the way the regime would describe it: in neutral, procedural language. Use euphemisms. Use passive voice. Make it sound reasonable.
Then show how your protagonist must use this language too, even in their own thoughts, because the real words have been made unspeakable.
Technique #2: The Uncanny Mirror
What it is: Including one element that’s identical to our present.
Why it works: It creates cognitive dissonance. It forces readers to recognize their world in yours.
Example: In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred remembers shopping at the supermarket, her job, and her credit cards. These memories aren’t of some distant past. Instead, they’re of the 1980s. This created a thin membrane between reader and character. This could happen to you.
How to use it: Don’t make everything in your dystopia futuristic or alien. Keep some elements identical to now. Brand names. Technology. Cultural references. Then show how these familiar things exist in an unfamiliar context.
This is what makes Black Mirror so effective. It’s not technology. C’mon, we already have that technology. It’s what we’re doing with it.
Technique #3: Resistance Through Art
What it is: Showing how people preserve humanity through beauty, humor, or story.
Why it works: It reminds us what we’re fighting for. And it shows that totalitarianism can never fully win as long as people can imagine something else.
Example: In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred plays Scrabble with the Commander. This outlawed game becomes an act of resistance.
Not because it changes anything, but because it preserves her mind. She makes jokes in her narration. She notices beauty. She tells her story.
How to use it: Give your characters some way to create, enjoy, or preserve beauty. It might be contraband books, illegal music, memory games, unauthorized jokes. Show both how precious these things are and how inadequate they are against the machinery of oppression.
But here’s the key: don’t make art the solution. Make it the reason to keep living. There’s a difference.
Technique #4: The Time Slip
What it is: Contrasting before and after in the same person or place.
Why it works: It emphasizes what’s been lost. It shows how quickly “normal” can disappear.
Example: Offred frequently remembers her life, her job, her daughter, her husband, her freedom. These flashbacks aren’t just a backstory.
They’re evidence that she was a complete person, that the life she remembers was real, and that what’s happening to her is an aberration, not destiny.
How to use it: Give your protagonist a “before.” Don’t make them born into dystopia (unless you’re making a specific point about normalization). Let them remember something better. Then show how they protect, doubt, and occasionally embellish those memories.
This creates devastating irony: the protagonist knows things could be different because they were different. But this knowledge doesn’t help them escape.
Technique #5: The Propagandist’s Voice
What it is: Including the regime’s official version of events through slogans, broadcasts, or documents.
Why it works: It shows how power writes its own narrative. And it creates a split between what the regime says and what the character experiences.
Example: In 1984, we get “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” In The Hunger Games, we get Caesar Flickerman’s nauseating commentary. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we get the Aunts’ lessons about how women are “protected” now.
How to use it: Create the language of your regime. Write their slogans, their news broadcasts, their propaganda. Make it sound almost reasonable. Then show how it contrasts with reality.
The gap between the official story and lived experience is your story.
The Test of Good Dystopian Fiction
Let me give you a metric those articles don’t provide.
Your dystopian novel is working if:
- A reader from the future would recognize the present in it Not because you predicted correctly, but because you identified the pattern. Orwell didn’t predict surveillance cameras, but he understood the psychology of surveillance.
- Your reader feels implicated, not superior They’re asking “what would I do?” not “thank god I’m not like those idiots.”
- The horror isn’t in the spectacle but in the acceptance The scary part isn’t what’s happening. It’s that people have learned to live with it.
- Your reader can’t find easy solutions If someone can read your book and think “well, they just needed to [simple solution],” you’ve failed. Real oppression doesn’t have simple solutions.
- It’s uncomfortable to read but impossible to put down Not because of action, but because of recognition.
- You’ve made yourself uncomfortable writing it If you’re comfortable with everything in your dystopia, you’re not pushing hard enough. Some part of your book should make you squirm because it’s hitting too close to something you’d rather not examine.
- There’s no clear “good guys” and “bad guys” Just people making choices under impossible pressure, some better than others.
- The ending leaves readers with questions, not answers They should be thinking about your book days later, still wrestling with its implications.
What No One Tells You About Publishing Dystopian Fiction
A practical note those articles skip entirely:
Dystopian fiction that matters will make people uncomfortable. Publishers may love it or hate it for the same reasons. When The Handmaid’s Tale was published, some people called it feminist propaganda.
Others said it was anti-feminist for showing women in such degraded positions. Some said it was alarmist. Others said it didn’t go far enough.
This is a good sign.
If everyone agrees with your dystopia, if it simply confirms what readers already believe, then you’re writing propaganda, not literature. Good dystopian fiction should be arguable. It should make some readers angry. It should be accused of going too far and, on top of it, not going far enough.
Be prepared for:
- Readers who think you’re exaggerating
- Readers who think you’re secretly enjoying the violence you depict
- Readers who demand you provide solutions (you don’t have to)
- Readers who insist this could never happen (it already has, somewhere)
- Readers who are frightened by how plausible it is
All of this means you’re doing it right.
A Final Note: Hope and Despair
The articles mention that YA dystopia needs hopeful endings. This is publishing advice, not creative advice, and I want to complicate it.
Dystopian fiction’s job isn’t to provide hope. It’s to tell the truth.
Sometimes the truth is that resistance is possible. Sometimes the truth is that it’s not, or not in the ways we’d like. Sometimes the truth is that we won’t live to see the outcome of our choices. Sometimes the truth is that even victory is hollow because of what we had to do to achieve it.
What readers need isn’t false hope. It’s the suggestion that truth-telling matters, even in the face of overwhelming power.
Every dystopian novel is an act of resistance against the idea that we must accept the world as it is. By imagining how things could get worse, we’re implicitly arguing that they could also be different. That’s not the same as saying they’ll be better. But it’s something.
When people say that The Handmaid’s Tale is too depressing, I remind them that Offred survives long enough to tell her story.
I somehow thought it was worth recording. Someone else thought it was worth studying. The act of witnessing in the form of saying “this happened, this was real, this was wrong” survives even when the witness doesn’t.
That’s the only honest hope dystopian fiction can offer, and that is someone might be listening. That testimony matters. That even in the darkest timeline, some human impulse toward truth persists.
Is that enough hope?
I don’t know. But it’s the truth. And in dystopian fiction, truth is all we have.
Now Go Write Your Nightmare
You know now that dystopian fiction isn’t about inventing futures. It’s about exposing presents.
You know it’s not about heroes defeating evil, it’s about ordinary people navigating complicity. You know it’s not about providing answers, it’s about asking questions that don’t go away.
You know that the best dystopian fiction makes you, the writer, uncomfortable. That it implicates you. That it forces you to ask what you’d do, who you’d become, what compromises you’d make.
And if you want fresh inspiration, I’ve got you covered too. Check out my dystopian fiction writing prompts list. Pick one prompt there and use the hacks that I gave you in this post.
You’ll be miles ahead of most dystopian fiction writers today.
Articles I referred to:
https://nownovel.com/how-to-write-dystopian-fiction/
https://jerichowriters.com/how-to-write-a-dystopian-story/