A Writer's Struggle
Writing is amazing and annoying. Ideas take a lot of effort to flesh out. When you live in your head often ideas you once thought were unique feel overplayed and repetitive simply because you yourself have been turning it over in your mind for so long. Often I want to start an idea and it quickly becomes a monumental task that requires me to map out a whole world. How does the magic work? How do people live day to day? Are everyday moments too mundane?
I know we want to move the plot along or develop characters. When I was in film school the question was always what does this scene do to further the plot or character’s struggle. What purpose does it serve? But, with film, we are working with a set amount of minutes. That makes sense.
There are books that are pages upon pages and when I read I don’t analyze the texts or question whether each scene is necessary. Maybe I should, to better understand, right? That’s what people do when they work with a craft. Turn it inside and out to better do the thing and all that. My thinking is… People are constantly revolutionizing the world with their ideas. There is no set way to do something right? So who’s to say my way is… bad? Unsuitable?
If you can garner an audience, it doesn’t matter in the end, does it? There are terrible people who are famous and “successful” in a sense simply because there are people who will give money and attention to it. Or them… whatever.
Anyway, this all spawned from the fact that in the past 2.5 months I’ve written close to 400 pages on various works with most of that being for fanfiction. Can I make money off of fanfiction? No. Can I entertain people, fulfill my desire to tell a story, practice my craft, and maybe garner an audience who finds what they need within my writing? Yeah. And maybe one day when I finish my Magnum Opus of a book series people who have followed me long enough can find ghosts of themselves in the pages… and that sounds pretty fucking amazing.
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