As promised I am starting my blog on the first day of a new year. I hope you enjoy my musing. For my first post I will write about what writing means for me.
Writing is magical in so many ways. As writers we create people, worlds, places and storylines. Our characters can emerge from our memory or from real life, but they start as a name and then grow and develop into people our readers love or hate and definitely can't abandon. We make our characters have a history, emotions, motivation and goals. Our characters have thoughts, beliefs and relationships with others. They grow and develop quirks and sometimes take over our stories in unexpected ways. They love, hate and act on all of their emotions. They feel, see, touch, smell, taste and hear their world and bring it alive for the reader. Sometimes they behave out of character but they are always changing and hopefully for the better.
We create their world. We describe rooms, houses, work places, favourite places and scary spaces. Some of us create our worlds in different times, delving into history and presenting another age. Other writers create whole universes outside our own. Their stories give readers a glimpse into the impossible, allow the introduction of brave new ideas and technology. World building is magical, but it has to make sense and have the logic and rules so that readers fully immerse themselves in the world and can accept the actions and motivations of the character. There must always be an emotional connection between the protagonist and their world and the reader.
The storyline is what holds the characters and their world together. It helps to have a goal for the hero to strive towards. Putting lots of obstacles in the way of the goal adds tension and conflict. I like to make my characters work hard for their ending. Overcoming internal and external conflicts give the character the ability to change and grow. Hopefully the reader will go along for the ride.
But while magical, story telling can be ruined by poor writing, slow pacing, grammatical errors, poor research, plot contrivances and a host of other problems. The art of creating a story needs to be tempered with the rules of literature. Good prose is as essential as good creativity. Getting the two elements to work together is the hard graft of writing. I will cover some of this in future blogs.
Elsie King Copyright 2023
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