At its core, writing is not an exhibition–not something you do to show people that you can, in fact, do it. I think that this is something a lot of people get wrong. I’ve seen writers who relish in their wordcraft, enjoying how they’ve, say, reduced a reader to tears. They throw out a cornucopia of words in an attempt to manipulate the reader: “Look what I can do! Look what I made you feel!”
I refer you to a quote from the great Ursula Le Guin:
“A writer whose intention is to frighten and distress the reader has a very aggressive program and a very limited goal. Serious writers want to do something beyond asserting power over their audience, beyond self-satisfaction, beyond personal gain — even though they may want all those things very much.”
Maybe I am wrong, and overthinking this. But I’ve found, in all these years, that the craft of writing revolves around honesty–yes, even when we’re talking about make-believe people, worlds, languages, and events. Writing, I’ve found, is mostly about unraveling the truth, however that truth may mask itself. This is easy enough to understand in a field like technical writing: you have to relay information to the reader, and the quickest, most effective way to do this is to just straight out tell them what’s what. No meandering around, no, “So, how was your day? Good? Well, mine too! Now let’s talk about how to troubleshoot your smoking PC…”
It’s a little harder to see with creative writing, particularly fiction. Isn’t the point of it to make shit up? To tell a story? Well, yes (to a certain degree) and yes. But one can still tell the truth, even in fiction. One should.
Easier said than done. “Truth”, after all, is subjective. But that is what makes it crucial for fiction. You need to keep track of what is “true”–what is true for the character, what is true for that world, and what is true in general. And you have to stick to these truths until your story begins to breathe on its own.
When you are telling a story, you are trying to find ways to articulate something that may not always be clear. Keeping truth-telling in mind makes this easier, because you understand that if you don’t know what to write, what you will be doing next is finding answers rather than making something up. Those answers form a background, one which should be infallible. In the future, when a new problem occurs, that background should stay the same.
It is, I suppose, a subtle difference, but it is often enough. A writer who makes this error may produce work that reads well enough, but feels empty. Soulless. What does it mean, after all, when one says one is “soul-searching”? You’re looking for the truth. It is not so different with writing.
In short, a writer must be honest, and must therefore spend a lifetime of attempting to tell the truth even when it isn’t the easiest or most convenient thing to do.
It doesn’t mean you tell the reader everything from the start–far from it. It does mean that you have to start becoming aware of how things are and what you are trying to say. For me, especially since I write character-driven fantasy, I’ve found that I spend a lot of time dissecting my emotions, as well as those of the people around me. People, at the core, are all the same: we all have desires, needs, hopes, and dreams. We all want to be happy. But perspectives are different enough that they colour the way we view the world.
It is also why I write on this blog. Being able to say what you really want to say is not an easy skill to learn, and the meandering way I’m doing this is probably an indication that I still have a long way to go. Which is okay, because writing is a process, like I’ve talked about before and it’s not like I’m picking up any other productive interests anytime soon…
Read The Agartes Epilogues, where sometimes characters can get a little too honest, and all you want them to do is shut up and stick somebody with their sword.
