Hello, friends! Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Jennifer Lane, L Diane Wolfe, Jenni Enzor, and Natalie Aguirre. Are you a writer? Do you feel insecure? Well then good news! This is the support group for you! Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.
As you can probably tell from the name of my blog, I love space. I also love science and science fiction. I’ve been loving space, science, and science fiction for such a long time now that I’ve developed a highly scientific, highly evidence-based view of the world. I don’t pay attention to astrology. I don’t take tarot cards or Ouija boards seriously. I don’t knock on wood or worry about black cats crossing my path. I don’t believe in any superstitions except one: I do believe in fairies.
That’s because I happen to know a fairy. I call her my muse, and she can be super annoying sometimes, always pestering me with new ideas and nagging me about writing whenever I take even the shortest possible break from writing.
It’s hard to deny the existence of fairies when there’s this one fairy who just will not leave you alone, not even for one goddamn minute!
Anyway, the real point I’m trying to make is that there is a highly scientific, highly evidence-based approach you could take to writing. You could learn all about the craft of writing. You could study plot and characterization. You could memorize all the heroic archetypes and all twelve steps of the monomythic journey. You could find out what words like synecdoche and antimetabole mean and then apply those concepts to your writing.
And… okay, sure, you should spend some time learning about those things. But don’t get too technical about writing. Don’t take too scientific of an approach. Leave room for sudden inspiration. Be prepared for things to suddenly make sense, and you can’t explain why. That’s probably your muse sprinkling fairy dust on your head, causing the magical side of writing to happen.
P.S.: Of course, the great science communicator Carl Sagan once said exactly what I’m trying to say, except much more succinctly: “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
i-love-space.com 
Too much of that stuff stifles inspiration.
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Exactly. It’s good to know some of the technical stuff, but relying on it too much produces stiff, formulaic writing.
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You need to know the basics but not let rules squash the creativity.
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Agreed.
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I agree totally with your fairy, James. Writing is becoming too technical, so technical it’s squeezing out inspiration and originality.
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I met a fellow writer once who described her whole book in monomythic technical terms. She did have some neat ideas in there, and I hope she was able to do something good with it; but the way she talked about it at the time made it sound so formulaic and bland.
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I agree totally with your fairy, James. Writing is becoming too technical, so technical it’s squeezing out inspiration and originality.
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Use all the technical for after the words are down and I’m beginning to think that that fairy is just guilt with wings. Maybe, your muse is tied up somewhere and there is an impersonator tormenting you… just a thought. 🙂
Anna from elements of emaginette
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I remember some advice I heard on a podcast once: just write and ignore all the technical stuff until you run into a problem. The technical stuff can help you diagnose a problem when you get stuck. Then once you’re unstuck, go back to just writing. I think that’s a healthier approach.
As for my muse, I don’t know. She’s been bringing me a lot of new ideas lately. Whatever’s going on with her, I think it’s a good thing.
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Hi,
Your statements below are words of wisdom.
“But don’t get too technical about writing. Don’t take too scientific of an approach. Leave room for sudden inspiration. Be prepared for things to suddenly make sense, and you can’t explain why.”
Sudden inspiration gives life to the story.
Shalom shalom
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Exactly. Formulaic storytelling is lifeless storytelling.
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I wish I had a muse constantly nagging me to write. Truth is if I don’t push myself, nothing happens, not even blog posts. Particularly with work and other pressures.
But as I mentioned on your last post, I’m realizing I need to find the joy in writing again, the sheer expression of writing down daydreams. Without that, all the craft seems like an empty engine needing gas.
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This post was influenced by that conversation we had over the previous post, and the article you shared. I was already kind of thinking of doing something like this for IWSG today, and you helped push me into actually doing it.
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Well, as long as you know your fairie is an imaginary construct of your brain. I talk to my dogs who have passed on. I know they are only in my memories, but it helps to keep them alive in my head.
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My muse been dodging me lately then pops in whenever they feel like. Sigh.
Love the Carl Sagan quote “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
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It’s a great quote. Sagan was a scientist first, of course, but I think he understood the magic of writing better than some full-time writers.
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Learning about the craft and sometimes even the theory does help, but just as importantly if not more is to write from inspiration. I do believe in a spirit of a sort that inspires my writing. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be continuing to write today.
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Same. I’ve been in a bit of a writing rut for a while now. Inspiration just wasn’t coming to me, but the the memory of what writing used to feel like kept me from giving up during this most recent dry spell.
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I love this idea! Like you said, it sprinkles fairy dust onto the whole writing process and brings some much-needed magic and fun. Sometimes it feels like I have gargoyles sitting on my shoulders instead of fairies, but I need to remind myself that there’s so much more to writing than pressure and stress. There’s joy and wonder and the gratitude of being able to do what I love. Thank you for the reminder.
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I know what you mean about the gargoyles. There are times when writing just feels like a chore. It’s been feeling that way for a while for me, and it takes a little conscious effort to reconnect with the magic.
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I’d not read that Carl Sagan quote before, but couldn’t agree more. To me, there’s always been something alchemical about the writing process.
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Agreed. One of the things I love about Sagan is that he had a keen scientific mind, and yet he could still see so much magic in the world.
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I’ll see your fairy and raise you one angel.
I wrote about the magic of prose in one of my blog posts, “Perspectives on the Power of Prose.”
Writing fiction, for me, is something like witchcraft. It is also a craft where a practitioner can put words together in a certain order, including other appropriate ingredients (in the case of fiction, things like punctuation and points of the plot). Though the practitioner does not physically contact the target, the target can be affected. Through fiction, a writer can have an influence on a reader without either being aware of the other.
I can describe it in another way. When writing fiction, the person casts something like a magic spell. Like a magical spell, a piece of fiction has a very tenuous connection to anything real. The power of fiction comes from the imagination, not from the physical or solid facts. Even though fiction is conjured up only from the writer’s mind and shows up only as ink on a page or pixels on a screen, it can affect people across multiple continents, languages, and centuries.
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I sometimes think my muse pulls double duty as my guardian angel, but that’s a whole other topic.
I remember a Sci-Fi writer (it might have been Joe Haldeman, but I’m not sure) saying that writing is a form of telepathy. You get to implant thoughts and ideas into your reader’s mind, and your reader is voluntarily allowing you to do so. Writing comes with a lot of responsibility when you think about it that way.
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