Creative Writing Questions
I, as is natural of a writer, am a member of many creative writing and fantasy support groups. In these groups I see the same questions appearing quite often, usually met with little or no response, so I thought I’d give some common writing questions, and give my two cents on the matter.
The first question that seems to come up a lot revolves around the common saying ‘Write what you know’. That is, many people ask “Can I write about _____, even if I don’t know anything about it?”
While I admire people’s humility in asking such a question, it shows an underlying misunderstanding of the concept of fiction itself. Tolkien never once, not in his entire life, destroyed a cursed ring. If people only wrote what they knew, in a deeply literal sense, there would be no fiction. If you take that train of thought to a logical extreme, you can ONLY write a story about someone of your gender, height, race, sex, job, who was born in the same town as you. This is, obviously, unhelpful from a fictional writing perspective.
Writing that which is unknown to you is one of the joys of telling a story, it pushes you not only to learn more about the world, but also to contemplate what could be beyond your tiny life and limited scope of experience. The trick is to write what you know of character. Write characters that act and feel he way you have personally acted or felt before, or at least in a way you can understand. This is the key behind that cryptic piece of advice ‘Write what you know’.
The second problem people seem to have is beginning. “I have this idea for a nine-book series, how do I start?” pops up with alarming regularity on forums internet-wide.
My first thought would be to slow down. Nine books is all well and good, but a book in the hand is worth two in the… bush? Point is, a lot of people want to have their series done and dusted, put on shelves and raking in the money, but they don’t want to invest in actually writing nine books. So first things first, let’s do one book first. Let’s make it one good, solid, stand-alone book to make sure we want to do this. Keep the idea for the series, absolutely, but try a single story first. This is exactly what happened with me, with the Whispering Depths. I wanted to be like all the other fantasy authors, but realised I needed to write a single book first.
Once you have your single book idea, the next thing to do is literally just write. I don’t want to brush off how much work writing actually is, but all you need to do is write. That’s it, for a start.
Write and the rest will follow.
In terms of writing, I’m almost hesitant to offer a step-by-step guide because the way everyone writes is so different. Personally, I can’t write without a clear plan or outline on the entire story, beginning to end, usually around 2000 words. I do this for several reasons, one is that if I have writers’ block, or don’t want to write a certain scene, I can skip forward or back and write a scene I’m excited about instead. Another is it allows me to brainstorm narrative structure, themes, and plot BEFORE committing. I don’t want to get 20’000 words in and realise some huge detail should’ve been drastically different for the moral struggle to work.
But that’s just me.
Begin writing, however you do it, and the rest will follow. Finish a manuscript, find or hire beta-readers, revise and edit yourself, do at least 3 drafts, then send it to an editor.
The business side of things is a whole other beast, and we’ll get into that in a future post.
For now, just write. Write frantically, get your whole manuscript out of your head and onto the page, THEN revise.
Finally, the last thing that pops up commonly is AI. People are both tempted to use it, and afraid it will flood the market with diluted, mass-produced trash. If you take your nine-book idea from earlier and give it to an AI, it can spit something out within minutes. This is one of the reasons AI is so appealing. While tempting, it will never replace real story-tellers. Not because it will never be as skilled as people, but because of audience expectations.
AI will, one day (probably soon), be able to write on-par with humans, and be nearly indistinguishable. However, if you give audiences a choice between two stories, one written by AI and one written by a human, they will almost unanimously choose the human story. Not because the AI is bad, but because of the reason we consume stories. We don’t read because we admire the prowess of the author, that’s just a bonus. We read because we want a deeper understanding of the human experience. We want to hear someone else’s tale, and we can never get that from AI, inherently. AI novels will never be big, because audiences know that it’s soulless.
We’ve seen this countless times. Huge studios have gotten in big trouble from their fans for using AI in their content creation. It’s happened to Marvel, it’s happened to Disney. If they can’t get away with it, you probably can’t either. People don’t want to listen to AI stories, not because they’re bad, but because they lack intent. People know it’s just an algorithm, it’s not new or real.
Remember, AI in it’s current form cannot create or innovate, it can only replicate what humans give it. By finding patterns across multiple works it can generate something that fulfills the same criteria and patterns, it can never do something new this way.
It’s skill is only in it’s speed.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading this far! Keep an eye on the blog, or subscribe to our e-mail updates to stay in the loop!
-Lachlan Bond
