Write what you know

I AM NOT LOOKING DOWN on fantasy writing. I even said "I'm not going to diss the fantasy genre".
In my opinion, "just write" is not good advice.
Just writing can produce rubbish sometimes if you haven't got the basics.
You don't need to be "an older writer with life experience".
Try writing about a trip you made to the supermarket and make it gripping--who did you see, what did you see/smell/hear. Use correct grammar and describe in an interesting way.
That's how you learn to write IMO.

 

I would question this but I don't want to hijack this thread. Let's just say, to me, that doesn't imply what I suspect some folks might think it implies.

 

Although I am intrigued what you were about to say, whether it implies this or that, it's still not a helpful place to be and the result is the same, i.e. no started work. If this hypothetical person is stuck writing superfluous background details because he/she thinks that writing is making a series of decisions about a world's history or its magic systems (like trying to balance out spells as if it's a card game), the best thing is to politely inform them that stories need characters and the drives of those characters, well, drives the story.

 

I'm not sold that the cause for people never getting beyond worldbuilding is what's highlighted above. Which means I'm very skeptical that your solution of "politely informing them that stories need characters..." would get them moving.

 

What is your reasoning for this? General perfectionism? Fear of truly getting started? Anxiety over combining all these details into a story? Genuinely interested.

 

You make good points, but I can't agree wholeheartedly with your contentions. I taught creative writing for years and one of the first things I did at every class was give my students permission to write absolute rubbish until they could break through to something really good. "Just writing" is practice, and lots of practice sounds like rubbish. Ever hear a beginning violin student? The noise is at times untenable, but is it rubbish or just the noises one must make in order to learn to play? Same with writing. If one is constantly self-conscious about grammar and punctuation and producing something other people might find gripping, writing practice is liable to be abandoned. That is not to say grammar, etc. aren't important, because they are, but so is the ability to let words and ideas flow without simultaneously trying to edit them every step of the way. That is why new writers are so often told to "just write." I am not a new writer, and "just writing" is one of the most valuable things I practice. And yeah, I still produce some incredible rubbish.

 

I think there's a difference between doing little "writing exercises" to get the creativity flowing etc and actually trying to produce a finished piece of writing for others to read.
If you're writing something that isn't just for your own gratification, of course it should be gripping (and gramatically understandable). No one sets out to confuse or bore the pants off their readers.

 

One of us is missing the point and it could be me. The post above was specifically in response to this statement: In my opinion, "just write" is not good advice. Just writing can produce rubbish sometimes if you haven't got the basics.

It isn't a matter of "little writing exercises" versus producing a finished piece of writing. Producing a readable, saleable piece of work often starts with "just write" followed by judicious editing and rewriting to remove the rubbish and leave the good, clean product. Obviously, to do the editing, one needs a good grounding in language mechanics, and a person who slept through eighth grade English is going to have to get a clue in order to write well. In the meantime, "just writing" is as valuable as memorizing Strunk and White. A person learns something from both endeavors and will eventually be able to put all that is learned toward producing something that won't confuse or bore the pants off his or her readers.

Perhaps it is a difference in philosophy of writing. Some people set up a rigid structure for their story and plug in the proper elements, constantly aware of grammar, spelling, building suspense, etc. the entire time they're creating the story. Other just write, pouring everything onto paper without regard to structure, etc. When creativity is played out (at least for the moment), this type of writer returns to apply the mechanics of grammar and structure to the rough draft. Most writers fall somewhere in between the two, leaning toward one or the other depending on the nature of the final product.

 

Fear of being miserably unsatisfied with one's creative effort, in some cases. You can't lose if you don't play. But I suspect an oppressive lack of motivation/work ethic to be the biggest culprit. These hang-ups obviously crop up in all genres. Fantasy merely has a space where those types of people can seemingly make progress without actually making progress.

I should note that worldbuilding in and of itself is creative, and can be satisfying even if an actual story never comes from it. I can speak from experience on that. But that's a very different thing from not knowing stories need characters and that those characters need to be compelling.

 

so new writers writing fantasy dive right in with a 15 POV doorstopper. So what? there's no such thing as a perfect method to learn how to write. It's not what I would do, but so what? they know what they want. they have a vision. they're trying to reach it, and it's daring and it's ambitious and yeah it's probably not going to go according to plan, but who am I to say, "your vision is wrong; do it my way?" I'm just gonna hang out over here. If they want advice, they'll ask for it.

until then, may the horns of valor sound, and all that.

 

No one here has suggested there is a perfect way to write. Only potentially more helpful ways have been suggested. For myself, I even hinted that play ("nonsense") is important. And when I use that word, play, I don't mean to denigrate people who do write these epic projects without more experience. It can be of use. I just think people would be better off starting with smaller projects and getting to grips with the fundamentals of story before working on extraneous background detail, e.g. magic systems and extensive chronologies. By the way, just to give myself some credence and put some weight behind what I've said in this thread, I have hundreds of pages worth of text toward a large world-building project since 2016. I never intended to publish this work and I essentially wrote it only for my brother and a friend. People can make whatever they want, but I suggest short stories and novellas are a much better way to go about learning to write. Truthfully though, I'm of the opinion that a lot of these details modern fantasy writers use just can't make for a good story, but that's a whole other topic.

Edit: I think the serious issue here is getting stick on technical world building details. If this hypothetical writer is actually writing chapters, that's all good.

 

(read the first 7 responses and felt compelled to respond too, so forgive me if this was already mention in the discussion)

Sometimes young writers write SF/F to make sense of the complications in their real world.

Honestly, when I started writing as a kid, i wrote real things. I wrote about how being bullied made me feel. I wrote about my frustrations with my stutter. I wrote a lot about feeling isolated. I wasnt exactly the most attractive girl and was repeatedly being told i was ugly and that no one liked me, so i started writing "tragic" love stories and poetry where the girl and the guy never ends up together because one or both die.
I wrote a lot of "beauty and the beast" stories and poems, too. 2 of the most memorable things i remember writing back in middle school were stories you can call "fantasy."
In one of them, there was a brother and a sister. their town was being attacked by monsters and right when the brother and sister are running toward shelter, the brother is ripped away from the sister. (looking back on it now, my brother and i had always gone to the same school, but for high school, he went to a different one. I applied to go to his high school, and i got accepted, but things didnt work out and i had to go to a high school where i didnt know anyone but a cousin who was too cool to associate with me. i felt like i was alone).
The other story took place in a white room with nothing in it. There were maybe 5 kids in it, and each "day" a kid would disappear. one kid remembered being at school, then there was a lockdown and people in military uniforms came in and rounded them all up and put them in rooms. they thought it was a sort of emergency drill, so they went along with it. but when it came down to the final 2, they decided to break out and run away. when they got out of the room and ran, one of the 2 kids gets shot by the military, and the other makes a break for it and gets outside where she finds that everything outside is destroyed. it ends where the military guy says she's been contaminated, and he shoots her dead.

(dont know what was going on in my life when i wrote that one. that ones a lot to unpack.)

The older I get, though, the less rooted in reality my stories become and the more abstract they are. As an adult, my short stories seem to follow the same dark theme of contemplating life and death (in a recent submission of mine, the MC actually sits to talk with death asking whether its worth it to live forever and never be noticed, or live a brief life loved by all).

my novel length WIPs are SF/F, but still have themes in my life that i struggle with. Spirituality and faith... independence... isolation.... prejudice.
sure, its an escape from reality, but writing as these characters in these grand situations does help make sense of these things and take the pressure off of it in my real life.

 

Personally started with a novel idea. I got a ways in, realized i didn't have a clue what I was doing, and that I needed to back up and learn. I decided that short fiction was probably a good way to learn, so I switched over to that.

and the result of that was that i learned how to write short stories. I still didn't know *jack* about writing a novel. i won't say that it didn't help me at all, but it didn't teach me how to write a novel. i still had to grab and idea and suck at it for hundreds of pages in order to learn how to write a novel.

so in the end i learned two forms. and knowing how to write short stories has benefitted me, for sure - but i would never tell an aspiring novelist that learning to write a short story will teach them novel writing too, because based on my own experience learning how to be a successful short story writer and a successful novelist, that would be a lie. So if the writer in front of me doesn't want to write short, they don't have to. They're not missing out by not learning how to do that, and if they want to write novels and they don't want to write short stories i'm not going to suggest that they waste their time.

I guess that's a weird answer, but there it is.

i think it is a whole other topic...especially since I don't agree with your opinion, lol. Sorry!

 

Write whatever you really want to write. You need that power of fascination to pull you through and power you up. At some point hopefully you start putting elements from real life in, but hopefully you also play around with pure speculation and fancy. Start wherever your heart wants you to.

Fiction, including fantasy and sci-fi, is still a way of writing about real life, just in disguised form. How did I hear it put recently—some people go to fantasy and sci-fi to escape from real-life problems, but in fiction you find real-life problems in transmogrified form. Actually I think that statement was about genre fiction in general.

 

Young writers writing about life is fantasy.

 

We always write from our experience, whether we use the trappings of the real world, or the mix and match of myth that is Fantasy. Either way it's a story. Even nonfiction can be storytelling. The difference is in what constraints we work with and how much research we have to do. I don't think either way is better. They're just different.

 

Perhaps some people would like to improve? Possibly, dare we say it, be published eventually? That isn't wanting praise, it's trying to be an actual writer instead of a hobbyist.

 

If you write, you're a writer, and that's it.

if you'd like to be published, why not make a beeline toward that goal by doing what you actually want to do? if you want to publish enormous fantasy novels, why would you waste time writing in a form you don't want to publish, in a genre you don't want to publish? it doesn't make sense to me. why do writers of mundane world fiction get to do exactly what they want off the hop, but spec writers have to screw around with hoop jumping first?

 

I would contend that the behavior you are observing is very much people writing what they know- that is, a culture that takes a flash of the marvelous and finds a way to convert it into a lifeless system, or to make it “believable” to a mindset that cannot accept the possibility of life beyond the present misery.

“Write what you know”, okay, but so long as we recognize that, thanks to imagination, a person’s knowledge and experience can penetrate far beyond their immediate surroundings and experiences. Imaginary worlds are very often more real and impactful than what is taken for reality

 

Imagination is, of course, the key to the survival of the human race. Gods, mythologies, cities, civilizations, missions to space--all are in some way a product of the imagination. Imagination is tied up with foresight and planning. We literally thrive on stories. I think it's highly limiting to say that one should only write literary realism/naturalism. Still, I have defended Madhoca throughout the thread as I didn't take his first messages to be as severe as they might've sounded to others.

 

The problem is the language of your OP completely implies what you claim you aren't doing, Mad...

I think most people would've taken you at your word if you hadn't contradicted yourself within a few sentences. By explaining and generalizing your feelings on fantasy you did, in fact, denigrate it.

 

@big soft moose I definitely agree with you. Just to play Devil's advocate, one could argue that, in the most general sense, fantasy could exacerbate the issues of younger writers to create simple characters because fantasy better fits with archetypes and tropes. It's a lot easier and more fun for a child, I'd say, to write a self-insert hero or dark lord than to sit down and focus on a small-scale but meaningful experience. I guess without all the trappings and enticements of a genre that allows such free and unbridled creation, the act of writing might seem boring.

Anyway, in The King of Elfland's Daughter, Lord Dunsany made me care about a little magical troll creature because he had this fantastical being muse on the ephemerality of the human/non-human animal world while watching pigeons fly into an attic space at dawn. A perfect moment written extraordinarily well. I'm of the opinion that any creature or being can be made real and sympathetic.

 

I think writing what you want will inevitably produce your best work. I think it's easy to detect when a writer truly enjoyed working on a particular piece and this is contagious to the reader. Publishing should be an afterthought.