History That Never Was

Image by Goran Babic from Pixabay

Now that the videos from the 2026 WriteHive online conference are posted, I’ll be sharing some of those with quick summaries. Today, I’m talking about the “Writing Hopeful Futures” presentation with BrightFlame.

This presentation talked briefly about why authors say that they’re more drawn to writing dystopian stories rather than hopeful ones, but then focused primarily on changing that trend toward hopeful stories. Among some of the takeaways I jotted down were that dystopian stories are often written as a warning to people, but that since we are currently living in a time that is a warning, we don’t really need that warning anymore. There was also an emphasis on the power of stories to imagine better futures and inspire people to strive for those futures.

BrightFlame also offered a large number of resources for authors who might want to get ideas for hopeful sci-fi settings and plots, which are noted in the video as well as on her website. Rather than duplicate all of that information here, I encourage folks to watch/listen to the video (and/or read the transcript), which is just over 38 minutes!

Tags: advice, convention, hopepunk, science fiction, solarpunk, writehive, writing

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Wednesday, October 14th, 2026 at 6:00 am and is filed under Advice, Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.