Recently I've woken up to a startling reality.
Writing is about connecting to people.
Now I know that sounds kind of 'Duh!', but you have to understand how the writing process has always gone for me.
When I first tried to write a story I did it intending to impress the people that I hung around. I never felt like part of the crowd. One of those 'on the outside looking in' things that lots of pre-teens go through.
It didn't help that I lived in the projects and the word 'Geek' hadn't even been invented yet. My efforts got me called much worse words than that.
Still, I persisted because I discovered that writing helped me make sense of the world around me. It wasn't quite so scary if I was able to explain things to myself through fiction. All of a sudden stuff started making a lot more sense.
I've always been a fan of monster movies and science fiction. Add in a healthy dose of Old Time Radio serials and it's easy to see that I was doomed from the get-go.
Writing is a natural outgrowth of that love. When you see things on the screen it's almost automatic to begin re-writing it in your mind. You see where things could be made better or more clear. The imagination is spurred in ways that wouldn't occur to you on your own(well, that's partly because most movies or serials were written by teams of writers).
I did discover early on that writing is hard. It's easy to plan out a story or get some idea of how it should go, but the actual act of sitting down to write something that you hope someone else will like is HARD.
It takes an understanding of how people operate to make your story work. If your characters are constantly doing something that normal ordinary people can't understand or connect with then they will not read the story.
I don't mean that your superhero has to be shown using the bathroom, but he or she had better have at least one flaw that makes them 'human' to balance out all of the high wire acrobatics. If the character is too far outside the understanding or credulity of the reader, it will turn them off.
Even Superman has his weaknesses and had the audacity to fall in love and get married.
I realize that writing is about waking up in a lot of ways. You have to be awake and aware of the world around you to write about it. Think about this, even the world of Narnia with its talking lions and Minotaurs has some basis in reality. There are mountains and snow. There are political intrigues and family betrayal. There is a sense of the possible occurring right alongside the utterly impossible.
If you want to write a political thriller, don't you think it would be a good idea to learn how governments and politics work? If you are writing a technology story, being aware of current advances will help when it comes time to extrapolate out the inner workings of your star ships drive systems.
Don't get me wrong, you don't have to earn a political science degree or become a rocket engineer, but you should understand the basics.
That's what I meant by being awake when writing. I think that a lot of the stuff I'm trying to do is getting better because I finally admitted to myself that writing in a vacuum isn't possible and there is no way I will find everything I need to know in a book.
I have to talk to people. Get an idea of how their mind works. Learn a bit of what they know and then extrapolate out. That's what makes good fiction.
Well, that and creating characters that are human and capable of being cared about. Think about it, how many movies or books have you gone through only to realize at the end that you didn't give a shit about any of the characters?
Yeah, its something to ponder all right. And something to be aware of when I sit down to create...
Peace
