Writers get asked questions by non-writers, often ones that we can’t answer on the spot. Look, we put all our XP into words on paper, not words in mouth. So I have provided my own answers, which may satisfy non-writers or may give writers something to riff off in their own conversations.
Of course, all this comes from my own perspective, so not everything will remain true to every author in the world. But still, I would imagine there’s some overlap between me and every other author in the world, given that we’re doing much of the same things as one another.
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“What makes writing enjoyable?”
There are many reasons why writing is fun, and it all depends on the individual’s relationship to writing. But these are a few I can think of.
Sense of control. Fiction gives you complete control in every single aspect. You get to determine everything that happens. For many, especially those who didn’t have much control over their lives when they started writing, this is very addictive.
Wordplay. Fooling around with the textures of words and sentences is no different than a guitarist noodling around with chords. It feels good and provides tiny dopamine hits when we find the right combination.
Psychological study. Fiction lets us explore human nature and identify the tiny triggers that make people tick. It also helps us better understand the real people we come across (and maybe make them less annoying).
Catharsis. Like I noted in my article about writing as therapy, writing lets us release pent-up feelings by transferring them into characters. We can also rewrite painful situations to offer ourselves more control over the outcome.
Sense of achievement. For some writers, being able to say you wrote a book and finished a project is extremely rewarding, as it provides a measurable benchmark of success.
Authorial conversation. Being in conversation with an admired author by following their conventions, remixing their ideas, or taking inspiration from them can root an author in the longer literary tradition, giving them a sense of place in the world.
Representation. Authors from marginalized communities may have spent decades never seeing themselves reflected in books, so they are taking charge and doing that for others.
Validation. And, yes, some authors write because they want people to pay attention to them. We’re a social species. Being noticed by others feels good.
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“How do you come up with story ideas?”
We don’t really “come up” with story ideas so much as we find them by gluing stuff together and seeing what happens.
The magical writer brain is very good at connecting disparate pieces of information, called associative thinking. We draw from our large store of semantic memory (basically everything we know about the world) and draw links that were not there before.
So story ideas, characters, plot points, worldbuilding details, etc, emerge from fusions between things we already know but that don’t necessarily appear to be connected at first glance.
My most common way of worldbuilding is just ramming two cultures or geographic areas together in a way I find interesting. Breme is Celtic software running on Mongolian hardware. Sina is Korea with an English feudal system plopped on top.
Then I have to figure out how the geographic flip would change the base culture and make something new. I add new details based on stuff I like, such as poetry and horses and caves, and we’re good to go.
One of my next books, after the Eirenic Verses is done, was literally just based on the fact that I live in Cleveland and my brother plays Vampire: The Masquerade. It’s vampires in Cleveland but with some social justice themes and Lake Midwestern culture and magic flutes. The characters are based off Cleveland street names and the quintessential Midwestern hospitality. I’m looking forward to it.
In some cases, we don’t even realize where a specific aspect of a plot point or a character came from. It was only by musing that I realized Orrinir Relickim bears a lot in common, at his core, with my beloved late grandfather. My grandfather was also a man of few words who showed his love through action rather than saying anything; he had that gentle gravitas of a large, quiet man.
Whether my highly conservative grandfather would actually approve of my writing is a whole other thing, but still.
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“How do you know if your writing is any good?”
At first, you don’t – you think all your writing is good even if everyone thinks it’s bad. Or you think it’s all bad even if everyone else is assuring you that you’re good.
This is usually when you’re young and discovering writing and you’re amazed at the fact that you can develop brand new worlds all on your lonesome, or you’re too busy comparing yourself to your favorite authors and finding yourself lacking.
Over time, though, you develop an “ear” for it, like musicians will start to develop an ear for musical composition. This isn’t something you can discern algorithmically, which is part of the reason why AI writing won’t replace human craft.
Fiction writing, particularly in the extremely fucked-up garbage soup that is English, requires a balance between adhering to rules and breaking them. Following all the rules creates bland, formulaic writing that will satisfy a fifth-grade English teacher but bore everyone else. Breaking all the rules makes your work incomprehensible to anyone but you (and sometimes you, too).
But the issue is that there is no discernable ratio of rule-breaking to rule-adhering one can point to and go, “Yes, that’s the spot.” That’s because there are so many rules you can break, from micro (spelling) to macro (worldbuilding and generic adherence). You can’t break all of them all at once, and you can’t never break any of them. You have to develop an ear for how much you can get away with while still having a comprehensible story that is enjoyable to read.
I have stolen most of my rule-breaking conventions from poetry, which is perfectly appropriate for a series based on poetry magic, but other writers determine which rules to break from other disciplines, or they meld disciplines together to make an unholy genre souffle.
Like I said, you have to tune your inner ear for these things through years of practice. Then you’ll know when your writing is good and when it isn’t.
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“How do writers pick their specialty or genre?”
Let’s break this into specialty (nonfiction, journalism, SEO writing, fiction, etc) and genre.
When it comes to specialty, it depends on a writer’s training and their knowledge base. I am an SEO writer and I gravitate toward personal injury articles because I am comfortable with the more academic flavor of it; I have to cite laws and explain complex legal concepts in a user-friendly way.
Other writers may choose journalism because they were trained in it and are good at asking the right questions. These specialties are also based on our thinking styles; someone who is good at math will probably be good at writing engineering stuff or computer science stuff.
For fiction, though, it’s a little different. We tend to gravitate toward the types of books we enjoyed when we were younger: the texture and flavor of those books. People who read the Hardy Boys will likely write mysteries. Those who read Goosebumps will probably write horror. I read a lot of fantasy, and surprise surprise, I write fantasy. This isn’t true of everyone, but I’ve met enough writers who grew up on a certain genre and then wrote said genre that I can’t dismiss it as a fluke.
Then we get down to subgenres, which are often focused on what we find most interesting about the human condition or the types of difficult questions we are curious about. People who enjoy complex Rube Goldberg-esque plots are probably fascinated by cause-and-effect and philosophical questions like the butterfly effect and so on. I am interested in geopolitical tension, which is why my books have such a strong IR flair. I can’t turn that off.
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“What’s the actual writing process look like?”
You probably see memes all the time of writers saying that they wrote one sentence and then couldn’t think of anything else, or that they said they would sit down and write but then ended up going on a Wikipedia binge.
That can be true for any writer sometimes, but this is more common in beginner/intermediate writers who are still consciously applying everything they know about writing. I discussed the stages of writing development in my post about the curse of knowledge. The conscious application of thousands of tiny rules causes cognitive overwhelm and means that these writers get fatigued more easily than those who can apply rules instinctively.
More established writers typically have a process, like my stages of writing, that they execute step by step. When I start a book, I develop my double outline, let that sit, and then create the document with different headers for each scene. And then I just go for it. I write what I feel is best, I discover new things along the way, I sense the flow and add small details.
Sometimes the plot changes significantly when I come up with something while lying in bed in the middle of the night, or because of an interesting thing I found in a book, and so on. I am always in conversation with my characters throughout the process, and sometimes they want something different than I thought they did when I first started out.
They aren’t actually wanting new things, of course, because they aren’t real. But my subconscious is constantly digging up new associations that I may not recognize at first, then inserting that into the plot as I keep going.
Once the draft is done, it sits for a while before I look it over and add things I think will help. I often find I have to add more environmental descriptions and sensory descriptions because I get so excited about the plot that I stop mentally looking around. (That’s one way you can tell a book didn’t sit enough before being published – lack of descriptions.)
After that, it goes to my beta reader for another round of revisions. Sometimes I agree with her, sometimes I don’t. I give myself time to ponder her suggestions so I’m not dismissing them because my ego was wounded. I don’t discredit everything she says until I’ve thought about it a few times.
And lastly, editing, where I catch little grammatical errors and stuff.
All of these are different phases of the process and shouldn’t be combined into one big soup. That’s why some experienced writers are very slow; they’re constantly second-guessing themselves by editing while they’re writing.
Or they’re George R.R. Martin. I don’t really know what’s going on with him. He’s a separate story.
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“Why are some writers so weird? It seems like serious writers are all a little strange.”
I answered this in full over on Tumblr, and the answer itself is probably too long for this post, so I’ll paraphrase.
Fiction writers essentially create a parallel universe, of which they have full control, in their heads, which occasionally leaks out into the real world because the airlocks between these two are not hermetically sealed. Real life also leaks into our fiction, because real life is the agar upon which we cultivate our make-believe amoebas.
We also have to suspend disbelief in our own creations for days, weeks, months, or even years in some cases. In other words, we are living in an alternate reality for an extended period, developing it in real time with every outline and inspiration. It’s hard to re-suspend the disbelief and remember that all these things we made aren’t real.
While all humans are drawn to narrative (the book Brain, Mind, and the Narrative Imagination discusses this in extensive detail), most are passively absorbing them or making narratives of real-world conditions. Thanks to a writer’s strong associative thinking style, we start making up alternative narratives to everything around us, no matter what.
Case in point, my brother pointed out that no cola flavors are found in nature, so I had to be a contrarian.
They should make me Chief Conspiracy Theorist. I’d wreak havoc on the informational ecosystem.
This is a fun side effect of many occupations. A fire marshal is always looking for building code violations. A legal scholar thinks to themselves, “ah, right, that reminds me of the legal arguments in Roe v. Wade” about something completely unrelated. When you train your brain on one specific subject for long enough, you apply that framework to every possible circumstance.
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“Why do writers act so pretentious?”
Because for centuries, there’s been this idea that the writer is some noble, magical, superintelligent being who stands above others in terms of sophistication and prestige.
Strong communication skills have always been seen as a requirement for intelligence because they make intelligence … well, intelligible to someone outside of your own head. A person whose genius is locked within them is seen as stupid even though they may have completely different dimensions of intellect that are equally worthwhile as writing.
Writing is one of the few art forms that is explicitly associated with general intelligence, despite the fact that all art (and, indeed, everything) takes a type of intelligence to master. A virtuoso needs phenomonal understanding of music, while an incredible hip-hop dancer needs unfathomble levels of physical coordination. Even a high-performing manual laborer is intelligent in their own realm.
I also don’t believe in the idea of “general intelligence” anyway. Everyone is inclined toward a spread of certain specialties, and it is their ability to thrive in said band of human experience that determines their intellect. It’s unfair to generalize everyone according to some made-up metrics.
Or maybe I’m salty because dyscalculiacs always score badly on IQ tests because these tests heavily privilege mathematics.
Anywho, where was I? Pretention. Humans are comparative machines; we’re always gauging where we stand in relation to others. If you align with what the general culture believes is the pinnacle of intelligence, then this is naturally going to influence about how you feel about others and about yourself. Everyone gets downgraded in your eyes. You develop an inflated ego and act like an asshole.
Well, not every writer is like that. Or I hope we aren’t all like that, because if we are, then I’ve got some kowtowing to do.
Being a writer doesn’t make you smarter than everyone else. Associative thinking is very good for creativity, but it’s not the only thinking style out there, nor is it necessarily the most valuable.
Intelligence, like everything else, is contextual. Some writers haven’t figured that out yet.
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“How do you stay motivated and consistent through long projects?”
You have to have a good process and know where you’re headed. Failure to develop a process is the reason why many writers never finish their projects.
Without structure, the process seems endless, and this can create overwhelm. You start out with a grand idea, do the first chapter, and the second and the third and the fourth, but you’ve got no clue where you’re going. It starts to feel like you’re endlessly mining with no diamonds in sight.
If you have a process, then you know exactly where that diamond is; you’ve located it on your radar and can dig in the right spot. Maybe you’ll find some other cool things along the way. Maybe it will take you longer than you thought. But despite the setbacks, you’re guaranteed the finished product that you wanted, and this makes it possible to keep going.
Consistency comes from a very simple thing: showing up, again and again. Holding yourself accountable. Developing a framework that keeps you from burning out. Telling yourself you’ll do something and then doing it even if it’s not perfect.
As I’ve said about a million times on my blog, I volunteer at my therapy barn on the weekends. I go every single Saturday and Sunday, rain or shine, no matter the temperature. I don’t get paid for this, and there would be no consequences if I chose not to come.
One of the paid staff asked me why I come every weekend, and I was honest with her: because if I didn’t, then I would stop coming entirely. I have to come every single week because the consistency creates inertia and routine. Going just one weekend a month wouldn’t be sufficient; I would inevitably miss one of those weekends and then the chain is broken.
And I see this all the time in other volunteers. They come once, promise they’ll come back, but then they skip that second time, and then they never come back again. Or they come randomly without announcing they are coming and screw up my whole routine because they need everything explained to them all over again.
It’s the same with writing. You set deadlines, like “I start revisions on Monday,” and then you start the revisions on Monday. You tell yourself, “I will write at least 1,000 words a day,” and then you write at least 1,000 words a day (if not more).
I’ve shared all sorts of hacks for how to force consistency, like word count spreadsheets, but they all come down to the same premise: pushing past the initital resistance until you’ve built momentum and the process becomes almost automatic.
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I hope these were interesting answers to you, particularly about why writers are so annoying sometimes. We may have odd brains and have devoted ourselves to something both intangible and absurd, but writers have shaped the whole fabric of human society, so we’re maybe we’re onto something here. Give it a few 1,000 years and we’ll make a final judgment on whether this whole “writing” thing is worthwhile.
