Writer Problems

People too often conceive of worldbuilding strictly as background research, as a sort of dry and exhaustive homework. Every tiny and immediate detail in a story can be worldbuilding. Every button and widget can imply or reveal something to the reader. You can replace pages of deadly boring infodump with a few comments in conversation, a few glances at what people wear or eat or venerate. You shouldn’t think of worldbuilding as something boxed off from the rest of the text. it can be intrinsic with dialogue, description, etc. It’s crucial (and liberating) to realize that every word you put on a page can and should perform multiple duties simultaneously. Description can be worldbuilding. Dialogue can be character development. Messages within messages, revelation within revelation. Also, remember that nobody can follow all these guidelines all the time without exception or flaw. The point is just to keep aiming higher. It’s art as well as craft. Some parts of it you can measure almost scientifically. Some parts are mad whack inscrutable alchemy. But chances are, if you work hard to lay a solid foundation of craft, you’ll strengthen everything that’s more numinous and subjective, too. There is no “one true way” to write anything, nor one true goal in writing/publishing. Treasure beautiful oddballs and weird experiments.

Almost anyone can write; only writers know how to rewrite. It is this ability alone that turns the amateur into the professional.

Just remember that Dumbo didnt need the feather; the magic was in him.

The story is the only thing that’s important. Everything else will take care of itself. It’s like what bowlers say. You hear writers talk about character or theme or mood or mode or tense or person. But bowlers say, if you make the spares, the strikes will take care of themselves. If you can tell a story, everything else becomes possible. But without story, nothing is possible, because nobody wants to hear about your sensitive characters if there’s nothing happening in the story. And the same is true with mood. Story is the only thing that’s important.

My advice to young writers trying to get published is not to worry so much about publishing. Worry more about writing. You have a lifetime to publish; right now you have the opportunity to write and write and write without the constraints of publishing. You can learn without having the stuff you learn follow you around in print. There is world enough and time for publishing. I always (still!) try to put writing first and publishing second.

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

My favourite thing about this gifset is that George R. R. Martin acknowledges both of these methods without insulting or dismissing the other. He is a fantastic writer and I know that some other fantastic writers swear by their methods and discount the others, which can be really disheartening as a young writer. Hearing him describe both of these methods without dismissing the other makes me very, very happy, as I am very much an architect and I always get so sad when every writer I look up to is like “NO PLANNING. PLANNING BAD. WRITERS DONT PLAN.”

That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because, since you can’t control life, at least you can control your version.

Don’t compare your Chapter 1 to someone else’s Chapter 20.

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.