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I write because I love reading a good book and I want to make a story for my grand-daughter to read when she's older.
She's four and loves horses and unicorns. I am also a horse-lover and have owned five, so it's a topic I know.
I hope when she's old enough to read it (middle-grade to young adult), she'll still love horses, because that is what my story is about. If not, then I guess she's stuck with it.
I also like "I write to discover what I know." (Flannery O'Connor) I've found a lot of truth in that statement.
Yes.
I began writing to tell stories, but as I've grown older, my journaling has taken over. I've lived a long time, so I have many stories to tell in my journals.
Flannery was right. What she discovered in herself allowed her to see it in others.
I've found journalling to be painful sometimes, and joyful other times, but mostly, that I'm not an exceptional person. It's easier to see someone else's strengths and faults than my own.
I still write stories, but my characters all became a lot better after I had been journalling for a few years.
All my fiction is essentially events that come from my own life and are only amped-up and simplified a little.
A much as I desire to write a walloping good mystery, I know that's beyond me. I just don't have that much imagination.
I began writing to tell stories, but as I've grown older, my journaling has taken over. I've lived a long time, so I have many stories to tell in my journals.
Flannery was right. What she discovered in herself allowed her to see it in others.
I've found journalling to be painful sometimes, and joyful other times, but mostly, that I'm not an exceptional person. It's easier to see someone else's strengths and faults than my own.
I still write stories, but my characters all became a lot better after I had been journalling for a few years.
All my fiction is essentially events that come from my own life and are only amped-up and simplified a little.
A much as I desire to write a walloping good mystery, I know that's beyond me. I just don't have that much imagination.
I also keep a journal. Last year, I was able to retrieve an old journal that I kept for about 8 years which I wrote on those big floppy disks (if you remember those). I wrote in it EVERYDAY. It felt like an obsession that I HAD to write. I found a place on-line that would transfer them. So, I spent months reading what my younger self wrote about 20-25 years ago. It was an eye opener. Unfortunately, a few entries didn't survive but most did. I am glad that I kept that journal.
I stopped journalling for a while. I'm sorry I didn't keep one for those years. I did go to a message board and sort of used that as my journal until, some of the things I wrote came back to bite me. So, about 7 years ago, I started journalling again. I don't write in it everyday like I did with the old one but I write in it when I feel like I need to write.
I think Orwell generally had it correct. And I think that authors tend to tell people - including themselves - that their motives for writing are more whimsical and less self-centered than they generally are. I think they (we) tend to minimize those motivations that we perceive as less than flattering. This is just human nature.
However, one additional motive for writing I believe is to understand.
Military planners try to figure out how a North Korean attack on the South, or a Russian invasion of the Baltics, would play out. Civic leaders try and understand the impacts of hypothetical category 5 hurricanes on coastal cities, or what would ensue if the Cascadia fault fully ruptured (an 8.0+ earthquake) as it is wont to do every few centuries. They model these events by trying to imagine every step along the way and how various individuals - and society, and machines, and nature, etc. - respond.
In a sense, writing does this.
"What if a young man loses the love of his life due to his limited social standing, then single-mindedly spends the next decade making a millionaire of himself to win her over?"
"What if a good old boy stumbled across a drug deal gone very wrong, and found a satchel containing millions of dollars?"
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cormac McCarthy imagined these scenarios and wrote about them. They gamed them out, if you will, and titled their conclusions The Great Gatsby and No Country For Old Men, respectively. Those books are their answers to those questions.
Alternately, the question might begin with the conclusion, and what is considered is how the various players ended up at that given ending.
I think Orwell generally had it correct. And I think that authors tend to tell people - including themselves - that their motives for writing are more whimsical and less self-centered than they generally are. I think they (we) tend to minimize those motivations that we perceive as less than flattering. This is just human nature.
However, one additional motive for writing I believe is to understand.
Military planners try to figure out how a North Korean attack on the South, or a Russian invasion of the Baltics, would play out. Civic leaders try and understand the impacts of hypothetical category 5 hurricanes on coastal cities, or what would ensue if the Cascadia fault fully ruptured (an 8.0+ earthquake) as it is wont to do every few centuries. They model these events by trying to imagine every step along the way and how various individuals - and society, and machines, and nature, etc. - respond.
In a sense, writing does this.
"What if a young man loses the love of his life due to his limited social standing, then single-mindedly spends the next decade making a millionaire of himself to win her over?"
"What if a good old boy stumbled across a drug deal gone very wrong, and found a satchel containing millions of dollars?"
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cormac McCarthy imagined these scenarios and wrote about them. They gamed them out, if you will, and titled their conclusions The Great Gatsby and No Country For Old Men, respectively. Those books are their answers to those questions.
Alternately, the question might begin with the conclusion, and what is considered is how the various players ended up at that given ending.
Yes! My story started with a what-if question. What if a man giving lip service to abolition of slavery before the Civil War found himself forced to put his beliefs into practice?
Actually, it came about when musing about whether I personally would have been such a person at that time. The story started out with a woman as a main character, but given the time period, I found it better to change the gender for practical reasons.
I should really be getting back to that rather than messing up perfectly good posts in the Current Events forum...
I also keep a journal. Last year, I was able to retrieve an old journal that I kept for about 8 years which I wrote on those big floppy disks (if you remember those). I wrote in it EVERYDAY. It felt like an obsession that I HAD to write. I found a place on-line that would transfer them. So, I spent months reading what my younger self wrote about 20-25 years ago. It was an eye opener. Unfortunately, a few entries didn't survive but most did. I am glad that I kept that journal.
I stopped journalling for a while. I'm sorry I didn't keep one for those years. I did go to a message board and sort of used that as my journal until, some of the things I wrote came back to bite me. So, about 7 years ago, I started journalling again. I don't write in it everyday like I did with the old one but I write in it when I feel like I need to write.
Cat
One reason why I've kept mine going for so long is probably because I've never written in it daily as a goal. There have been many times when writing was daily, but other times when I wrote much less frequently.
From the first, it was never writing a diary. While it's all my viewpoint, I'm not always writing about myself, my life, or anything personal. Events of the day, events of friends, the news, and all kinds of random topics get as much attention.
I found it helped to have one way of beginning as a way to kick-start the writing. I always begin with the full date and time of day, followed by the weather conditions of the moment. The weather usually is a full sentence, and can sometimes become the subject of the day's entry.
I used to re-read them, and may go back to it, but I haven't for quite some time now.
I recommend keeping a journal or a diary to anyone who wants to write. It has always been a good way to get my creative side to get busy doing things.
I like notebooks and writing in longhand better than using a computer, but that's just me. Pen and paper never need batteries, and can go anywhere.
I need a keyboard. I have such terrible handwriting and (as Hubby put it) the pen gets in the way. And what I like about the keyboard, it is easy to correct errors/spelling (which I am terrible at). I can also add or rewrite a sentence easily. I find that my fingers on a keyboard can keep up with my thoughts. If I were to write with a pen & paper, it would go so much slower and I would probably lose a lot of my thoughts. (I used to type a lot in a previous life and even taught typing so it is pretty much second nature to me. I just took one of those on-line typing tests and got 60 words a minute with 4 errors.)
I need a keyboard. I have such terrible handwriting and (as Hubby put it) the pen gets in the way. And what I like about the keyboard, it is easy to correct errors/spelling (which I am terrible at). I can also add or rewrite a sentence easily. I find that my fingers on a keyboard can keep up with my thoughts. If I were to write with a pen & paper, it would go so much slower and I would probably lose a lot of my thoughts. (I used to type a lot in a previous life and even taught typing so it is pretty much second nature to me. I just took one of those on-line typing tests and got 60 words a minute with 4 errors.)
Cat
I prefer a keyboard, too. In 1978, I went to secretarial school, and while I'm a typing whiz, my penmanship went down proportionately.
I came across a journal I was keeping for awhile (have only ever done this in spurts) and I can't make head nor tail of half of what it says.
I think Orwell generally had it correct. And I think that authors tend to tell people - including themselves - that their motives for writing are more whimsical and less self-centered than they generally are. I think they (we) tend to minimize those motivations that we perceive as less than flattering. This is just human nature.
However, one additional motive for writing I believe is to understand.
Military planners try to figure out how a North Korean attack on the South, or a Russian invasion of the Baltics, would play out. Civic leaders try and understand the impacts of hypothetical category 5 hurricanes on coastal cities, or what would ensue if the Cascadia fault fully ruptured (an 8.0+ earthquake) as it is wont to do every few centuries. They model these events by trying to imagine every step along the way and how various individuals - and society, and machines, and nature, etc. - respond.
In a sense, writing does this.
"What if a young man loses the love of his life due to his limited social standing, then single-mindedly spends the next decade making a millionaire of himself to win her over?"
"What if a good old boy stumbled across a drug deal gone very wrong, and found a satchel containing millions of dollars?"
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cormac McCarthy imagined these scenarios and wrote about them. They gamed them out, if you will, and titled their conclusions The Great Gatsby and No Country For Old Men, respectively. Those books are their answers to those questions.
Alternately, the question might begin with the conclusion, and what is considered is how the various players ended up at that given ending.
I've been mulling this further for awhile, and I'd like to add another aspect to it.
We've all heard the ubiquitous 'Write what you know' bit of advice. And we see it. Vonnegut and Heller fought in Europe in World War II and wrote stories set then and there. Irving's main characters are frequently writers. McCarthy grew up in the South and moved to the Southwest in midlife - his early works are mostly set in the South, his later works mostly in the Southwest. King's stories often feature protagonists who are teachers and are usually set in his home state of Maine.
Yet an opportunity of writing is to write about what you do not know, that you may thereby come to know it. For many types of writing, this is a necessity. A story set in the Roman Republic, or featuring an wildlife park where cloned dinosaurs have escaped and are attacking our heroes, or taking place on a generation ship making the hundreds-of-years passage to Alpha Centauri, necessitates a great deal of writing about what one does not know and can not know.
On a less fantastic level, this can be taken to try on the shoes of others. One can do all the research possible about being in law enforcement or working as a patent attorney or driving a truck for a living. But immersing ourselves in those characters not only necessitates imagination, it can be a sort of gaming-out of how such people live and work and interact with the same world which we interact.
In a previous career, I had a job in IT and became good friends with a coworker. On many long 12-hour overnights we had downtime, which we passed with extended discussions about things including life. We had many other coworkers, and people being people there were always some in that group whose personal lives were disintegrating. Divorces here and there (one of particular fascination was this guy who was on marriage number five). We were in our 40s then, and we would often try and imagine negotiating the world of being newly-single after two decades of marriage. Both of us found it hard to wrap our minds around such a life change. Anyway, I ultimately would write a novel featuring a man in his late 40s going through a divorce. This was not what the story was about - that detail was in service to the plot and themes I wanted to explore. But in the writing, I explored the nature of the marital breakdown and my main character's uneasy path through that strange new (to him) social world. In this way, I was able to contemplate from a perspective far more detailed than I ever had before that life development which is quite common. That was by no means my intent, but as it happened I found myself fascinated with being able to have that viewpoint and, I think, to be able to understand it at least a little better than had I not written that piece.
What's it like to have a lot of siblings?
What's it like to be a black man in America?
What's it like to serve in combat?
What's it like to be female?
What's it like to be falsely accused of a serious crime?
What's it like to be a Marxist?
I don't know the answer to any of those questions, or to countless others I could rhetorically ask. And I don't pretend that writing about them will actually reveal to me what it would be like. But I do think that the writing process by which one immerses themselves in such perspectives and experiences can give insights otherwise unavailable.
For me, this is an aspect of why I write.
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