Writing on Writing
So one of the issues I am having with trying my hand at fiction is the fact that when you are crafting a world not just creating a world within our own but creating it as the future is being God.
As the author, as the writer you dictate the rules of the universe. As a gamer I played a lot of role playing games where the world building is visual as much as it exists within the context of the story itself.
As a fan of Game of Thrones, Dune, Star Wars and that like I love the world and so I dived into the deep end of the pool building a world. Usually you build the world around the story.
The story, your narrative becomes the frame and eventually if you are very lucky the world becomes bigger than the story that allowed it to be born. It is hard to go from being God and creating history, how the science works and what the places are to finding a single story to support your epic universe.
I’ve written more than 70k words that go into the state of the world, science and it’s history. I am trying to do science fiction. I wanted to build a world that was different than what had come before and once I got started I couldn’t stop.
Now I need to find the story. That may have been my biggest problem. The idea that I’ve had is to start with characters, create a person that exists in my universe and write a moment in their life, maybe it will be a life defining moment, maybe it will be a snapshot of their life, maybe it will show their outlook on the world but have something there that can act as a foundation if and when you decide to use this person in your story.
Maybe they will appear for a scene, a chapter or will one of the primary point of view characters. I always get stuck doing it. I have to start with the simple yet powerful narrative question “what if?” and go from there to see what grows from that seed of a character.
It will be a story, it may not be the story but it will be a story that even though it will exist in nothing but my mind’s eye (and synced to the cloud online) but it exists to me and that’s what fundamentally matters.
I am going to try to do both come up with stories and also come up with characters and see where the two can possibly meet. When you are writing it is hard to let go to give life to a story and let it go. You wonder if it was done, if you did enough and you can’t know how people will react to it until it is out there.
Then there is the market itself which you become a single grain of sand on an beach that is always growing wondering how will it ever be found. It is so hard but it has to be done.
I am staking everything I am not on this specific story but on the act of writing be it this story or another. It feels right and I’ve already gone so deep how can I not continue forward developing my world, finding the concept that will be the beating heart of the story I seek to create.
The universe is nothing but a place where your story can thrive. It is the home of your characters where you can go in and reflect our own world, the flaws and the joy to stay something about who we are and who we can be.
It is about the journey the characters take to learn and grow so that by the end they can be the hero in the story and feel like more than words on the page. They can be a mirror for a part of who we are and maybe who can hope and choose to become.
