Why? · 10:50am Jul 18th, 2013
So I got a PM from a fellow writing contemporary named Bad Horse (I'm using the dictionary definition of "a person or thing living or existing at the same time as another") who asked me a number of puzzling questions that revolved around a similar theme: Why do I write?
Now I must be clear about one thing: I don't ask myself such questions. I generally don't obsess over the "why" of things. I'm far too busy struggling to improve my writing skill, both technically and stylistically, so the question I ask myself tends to be "how." How can I tell a better story? How can I craft an opening paragraph that will catch the reader's interest? How can I learn to cut the boring parts where readers might lose interest?
There's something you need to understand about me: I take the easy way out. I write the stories that come to me naturally. I write about issues that genuinely interest me. I create characters that I would want to follow. I've been lucky enough to write most of my stories off the cuff, without any major revisions or rewriting. I know it's good to "do what comes" as an artist, but it also feels like low-hanging fruit... I've never really had to challenge myself by writing something outside of my comfort zone. For example, I don't write romance or erotic fiction. Why not? Do I avoid it because I think I'd be bad at it? Do I want to avoid writing things I don't enjoy reading? Am I taking some sort of moral high ground?
When someone asks me "Why," my immediate reaction is "Why not?" Seriously. Whenever anyone writes, they're really writing about themselves. It's inevitable. So perhaps my answer says something about me: I don't feel any particular need to defend myself or what I choose to do. I am a writer. I choose, for now, to write about colorful cartoon ponies. Just go with it.
But as we've just seen, that smarmy little quip comes with it's own baggage: If I write stories because "why not," then why do I not write romance or erotica? Just try and "why not" your way out of that, you elitist hack! No, there's got to be something more to this. Some deeper inner quality that drives me to pursue this particular form of art. And make no mistake, I'm not doing it for the giggles. I've written non-pony fiction before, and I'm apparently damn good at it. I have every intention of honing my skills and becoming a professional and that's a hell of a lot of work. Whether I achieve that goal or not is irrelevant: The simple fact that I'm taking it seriously at all suggests there must be some reason.
I mean, there has to be a reason. A good one, too.
...Right?
Bad Horse had four simple, straight forward questions that were very clearly laden with personal investment. It's obvious these questions have been haunting him, and now they're haunting me. Let's see what we can do about that.
1) Why do I write?
It really doesn't help that I think this question stands on its own. When I hear it, I stroke my chin, gaze up and to the left, and mutter "Yes... why do I write? That is a worthy topic!" and then I produce no useful answer whatsoever. Sometimes, readers don't want the answer. They want the question.
But this is reality, not fiction, and I owe myself a real answer.
I love storytelling, and I love reading, but those are just pleasant side-effects. The truth of the matter is that I write because I sit in a chair and put my hands on the keyboard. That is all. Authors sometimes worry about when they're allowed to call themselves a writer: when I publish my first novel? When I make the best seller list? When I can support myself through book sales? No. It's none of these things. If you sit and write, you are a writer. That's all it takes. The bizarre thing about it is how sudden the discovery was for me. I've been an imaginative daydreamer for as long as I can remember, and I spent most of my life reading books and playing/programming the video-games. This gave me many of the skills required to craft an interesting experience for the audience. I'd been idle and directionless for most of my life, falling from one year to the next, never realizing that I was bursting with ideas.
Eventually, someone (whose judgment I trust unquestioningly) said to me "You are a writer. You're good right now. Someday, you could be truly great." I woke up the next day and decided to start my first novel. Why not? Three weeks and an eighth of a million words later, I'd finished the most repulsive, embarrassingly bad story you've never read. And you never will. But I'd done it... I'd written something, dammit. Most ordinary folks have a great idea for a novel that they never get around to writing. Most ordinary folks don't realize that you can simply wake up one day and choose to be a different person. And that's exactly what I'd done.
So that's why I write. I have some natural talent for it, yes, but in the end it comes down to this: I write because I choose to write. It is a conscious effort on my part and it brings me joy. Eventually the polish will fade and it will bring me anguish, and that will be the true measure of my perseverance.
2) Does my writing make the world a better place?
God, what a pretentious and overwrought cliche. You know how in some video games (mostly JRPGs) your character has to "save the entire world?" You know why? Because it's a cheap shot at making you care about the story. Gasp: *I* live in The Entire World! This affects me, therefore I should care!
What a load. If you want to provoke a real response from the protagonist, you don't threaten something as nebulous as "the world." You threaten his little baby brother or his blushing fiance. Even that's pretty cliche by now... hell, threaten his ex-wife who he hasn't though about in years, and whom he might still feel some grudging compulsion to help even though they've grown distant enough for the pain of divorce to dull down to a faintly throbbing ache. At least that's got the potential for character interactions that haven't been done to death a million times before.
I know, I know... that wasn't the question at all and I'm dragging everybody down with me. My point is that you can never fall into the trap of trying to make "the world" better. The planet earth is a six sextillion ton ball of iron that has survived more devastating meteor impacts than you've had hot dinners. It'll do just fine with or without our help. What you should be worried about is people. It's always about people. It always has been, and it always should be. Never lose sight of the good things you might do on a much smaller scale.
Do my stories help people? Hell if I know. Even if they do, that's not specifically why I wrote them. I wrote them for myself, mostly, because I'm still at the point where I don't know what other people want or need. I suppose if you really want to help make the world a better place, you would have gone into journalism or politics. Or be one of the few writers brilliant enough to write insanely compelling short stories about urgent social issues.
Make no mistake, I believe that writing can be extremely powerful... but does my writing make the world a better place? That's not a question I can ask myself just yet. I'm too busy trying to make myself a better person.
3) Do I care whether [my writing makes the world a better place]?
Well this got personal all of a sudden. Fair's fair, though.
I do have to admit that most of my stories involve deeper issues. One of my personal favorites, Appletheosis, was written specifically to tackle the concept of Good and Evil in all its unambiguous glory. I think it raises some interesting points, but the conclusion doesn't really resolve anything: At the end of it, poor Applejack is worse off than ever before. Organized religion has done something terrible to her, and yet it's given her the opportunity to become something truly great. The ending is powerful, but it's really just the beginning of an even grander story we never get to see. What happens next is left to the reader's imagination.
I don't know if Appletheosis changed any of its readers for the better, but the real purpose of that story was never to improve anyone spiritually... I'll burn in hell before I unironically create the literary equivalent of a Chick Tract. To me, the question itself is what matters. Do not preach to your readers o fledgling writer. Do not seek to pound your message into their heads like a nail. Merely present an important question in such a way that it cannot easily be ignored or discarded, even by your detractors. I based a story on a well known biblical parable specifically because I wanted to turn it on its head and make it seem believable, realistic, and sensible. Within the context of the story, at least. People seem to think of the bible as ridiculous and unbelievable, but the miracle of fiction gave me the opportunity to explore it from a different point of view.
Go ahead and open your reader's mind a little. Give them something to think about. The world needs a little more thoughtfulness and awareness, and you can't foster that if you're too heavy handed.
4) There's such a thing as a bad story, but is there such a thing as an objectively great story, that's great for everyone? It seems like an absurd idea, so why do we all seem to believe so strongly in it?
Yes. Emphatically so. Things like "Genres" and "Story Tags" are merely crutches writers can rely on to find an optimal audience. The Romance genre is particularly crippled: cheesy love stories tend to follow extremely formulaic and predictable plots, because romance readers know exactly what they want and writers want to give it to them with as little fuss as possible.
But stories don't have to be "easily digested" to be good. Case in point: "Refrain", by FimFiction's own NTSTS. This story was entered into the same contest for which I wrote Erase and Rewind, and I gave his story a perfect ten out of ten. The contestants were all judging each other anonymously, so I knew this would decrease my own chances of winning. I even went so far as to end my review with the following comment:
"This story is better than my own. If it ends up being ranked lower than or equal to 'Erase and Rewind', I will feel as though I have been lied to. By whom, I know not."
My story won first place. Refrain won second place. I still feel kind of bad.
"Refrain" is not the sort of story I would ever normally read willingly. It was an extremely long, moody, pathos-laden slice-of-life coming-of-age story about a background character I have absolutely no interest in. I generally avoid the Sad tag, and I should have hated this story... hate, hate, hated it. But I didn't. It was so well written that I was utterly absorbed by it and enjoyed it immensely (EDIT: Come to think of it the third place winner, "Desert Rose" by Golden Vision, is in much the same boat: I should have hated it, but loved it). And that's one of my cardinal rules of writing: Ideas are cheap, execution is king. There's a reason why publishers can often judge a novels worth after reading only the first paragraph: it's because they're judging the writer's skill and ability, and they do this because they know the story's premise is nearly inconsequential. A great writer can turn even the most terrible story-seed into a fantastic story. Contrariwise, a bad writer cannot turn a fantastic story-seed into a good story.
Not convinced? I used to be a professional video game programmer. Whenever I told people this, their first response was usually something along the lines of "Oh, I have a great idea for a video game! Want to hear it?" I was always happy to listen to their ideas (if only to pad out the conversation) but I was always quick to point out that I will never make your game for you no matter how brilliant it is. Because ideas are cheap. What matters the most is the execution, and that makes up 99% of the hard, brutal work that goes into making a game.
A novel is no different. If given a choice between a brilliant writer and a brilliant story premise, always put your money on the writer. And if anyone can write an unconventional story (say, about a pantheon of petty, shallow, D&D style gods and goddesses who suddenly have to deal with a competing church comprised entirely of disturbingly benevolent and selfless atheists) it is the passionate author who will make that story compelling and interesting for both religious and non-religious readers.
Passionate people like a challenge. That's probably how they became passionate in the first place.
Dude, I answered those questions in like... Four sentences. :B Methinks I should have given them more thought.
1218387
It sounds like you did.
1218387 Do you really want to add more to this? What are you trying to do, kill me?
1218805
This was written primarily as a full-length post for my own blog. I wouldn't have written it if I hadn't doing enjoyed it, or if it hadn't been a worthy topic to explore in full.
And anyways, I was under the impression that you'd simply cherry pick useful lines as needed and summarize the rest yourself, adding your own opinions and observations. I won't throw a tantrum if you don't reproduce it in full.
EDIT: Oh snap... I think it really was your intention to reproduce it in full. Ouchies.
1218977 No, I'm cherry-picking, but linking to the full document, because it seems a shame to waste all that.
1218805
Is that a doc featuring all the answers?
Guess I've found my reading material for tonight.
1219004
The only wasted bullets are the ones you never shoot.
1218805
Uh, no. Not after seeing that.
No one between H and P? :O
1219689 I hate the letters I through O.
1219881
What did J ever do for anyone, really?
1220434 Right. I don't get all those people who keep asking, "What Would J Do?"
I feel like scum now. I asked more people to answer than I can possibly quote in the article. I wasn't expecting heartfelt thousand-word-plus answers.
1220462
>I feel like scum now. I asked more people to answer than I can possibly quote in the article. I wasn't expecting heartfelt thousand-word-plus answers.
Be cool, man. Be cool.
It's a pretty deep and engaging question. And besides: we're writers. We love to talk about ourselves. Regarding my own post, just take whatever you need and discard the rest. If you feel guilty, just post a link to the original blog post and all is forgiven.