Who are you writing for?

 

I’m going to push the schedule for Introspection Week. Yesterday was an in-clinic day for my wife, and sometimes we can take these in stride but other times they end up consuming the entire day, as happened yesterday. So given that I already have a really terrific guest column lined-up for Friday and the Introspection Week wrap-up scheduled for tomorrow, rather than delay everything by a day, I’m going to double-up on today’s posts and throw the tough question straight at your head right now.

We have already established that you want to write fiction, and specifically, that you want to write some form of genre fiction. When you write your stories—

Who are you writing for? 

I have a wonderful little book of Mark Twain’s writings about the practice and business of writing around here—somewhere, and I’m sure I could find it if I was willing to spend the rest of the afternoon looking for it—but I’m not, so I’m going to cheat and paraphrase instead. This book includes some of his correspondence with other writers of his time, and one letter in particular stands out. In it Twain was trying to disabuse a younger writer of the notion that writing should be art purely for art’s sake, and that one should relentlessly speak whatever one believes to be The Truth, regardless of one’s audience, or even if one is speaking to no audience at all.

Twain’s reply (paraphrasing now) was that writing alone purely for one’s own pleasure and satisfaction was like having sex alone purely for one’s own pleasure and satisfaction, and the practice should be discontinued by the time one reaches adulthood. 

Disagree with Twain all you like—and there is a multi-billion dollar sex toy industry that says Twain was wrong—but the essential truth of what he said was echoed decades later in all my communications theory classes. Every act of communication involves three things: a transmitter, a medium, and a receiver. 

When you transmit your message in the medium of the written word: who do you think is receiving it? 

Over to you,
~brb

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Why do you write genre fiction?

I grew up in a house full of books. I never realized that this was unusual. My parents were both teachers. My Dad, I think, was a frustrated historian turned basketball coach, because public school boards find winning basketball coaches much more valuable than history teachers, while I know my Mom had had some minor success as a poet. She’d belonged to a literary sorority in college and had stayed in touch with her sorority sisters well into the 1970s, inviting them over for social gatherings all the time. I know that at least one of her sorority sisters went on to become a mystery writer of some note, because I remember her giving me a signed hardcover of one of her books which I’ve long since lost, but for the life of me I can’t remember her name now.

The point is, I grew up in a house full of books, including the attic. Magazines, too: Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic. I think the only part of the house that didn’t have at least one bookcase and a stack of magazines was the basement, and that was only because being right on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan our house was remarkably damp, and any paper product stored down in the basement quickly turned to mildew and silverfish food.

As a child, I was surrounded by readers, and I learned to read early, constantly, and omnivorously. Again, I never recognized this as being unusual. What was unusual, so far as my parents were concerned, was that with everything I had to choose from, I preferred to read science fiction. I was a cerebral sponge, absorbing Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Andre Norton, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury…

Later, as an adult, when I wrote fiction, that’s mostly what came back out: fantastic and science fiction, filtered through what I’d seen and what I’d learned. I certainly didn’t set out to become a science fiction writer, and have sold more than a few things outside of the genre. My Mom, who adored Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and Erle Stanley Gardner, kept hoping it was just a phase I was going through, and when I sold a story to Hitchcock’s she was ecstatic, because she thought I’d finally seen the light.

The question has continued to haunt me all my adult life. As one of my less tactful co-workers once put it, “You’re a pretty good writer. Why do you write this sci-fi crap when you could be writing real literature?’

I think I know what my answer is, but before I say it, I’d really like to hear your answer.

Why, given all the possible kinds of fiction you could be writing, have you chosen to write fantastic fiction? 

Over to you,
~brb

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Why do you write fiction?

 

Yesterday’s post seems to have touched a nerve, so let’s continue with the line of introspective questioning. We’ve established that you want to write; perhaps even that you need to write. (You’d be surprised by how many successful writers answer the question of why they write with something on the order of, “I can’t not write.”) We’ll assume for the moment that you have some talent for writing, or at least that you’re trainable.

Next question: why do you want to write fiction?

There is a world full of opportunities out there for people with above-average verbal communication skills. For example, my training is in newspaper journalism, although I’ve never actually worked in the field. Internships, I think, come at the wrong end of education programs: by the time I finished my internship as a reporter I realized that there was no way I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing that, and quickly switched over to technical communications. So while I am known as a science fiction writer, I have actually spent most of the past 40 years writing enormous amounts of highly technical nonfiction, for which I rarely received bylines, but in general, for which I was paid very well.

So to reiterate the question: of all the things that you could do with your ability to express yourself in words, why do you want to write fiction? 

Submitted for your consideration,
~brb

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Why do you write?

 

The longer I consider the question, the more it begins to resemble a dance. We circle each other; writers both accomplished and aspiring ask for that “one piece of advice” that they believe will do… something for them, and I keep finding I can’t answer that question without asking my own questions, first.

• Why do you write?

• What do you hope to achieve by writing?

• What do you want to have accomplished by the time your career is over?

• Do you want to write, to be a writer, or to have written? 

I have more questions for you, but these will do for a start. Before I can give you meaningful help and directions, I need to know where you want to go. 

And if you don’t know where you intend to go as a writer, this is as good a time as any to start thinking about it.

Over to you,
~brb 

 

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