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.”