Topic: fiction writing
Thesis: we can understand the impact of the fiction we write. By changing the story, we can change the impact. My book about this is available now: How to Do Things with Stories.
With peace restored to the kingdom, the seas call to our heroic sailor. The maiden embraces him farewell, stung by the pains of parting sorrow, and perhaps of love. As the sails of his ship sink below the horizon, the writer asks: “Why the hell did I write this book?”
She looks around her room as if truly seeing it for the first time in weeks. A stack of pizza boxes have left a grease stain on her desk. Socks and T-shirts form a derelict pile in the corner. Scattered across the carpet are neglected envelopes and notes. Among them is a fragment of an outline—the first in her writing process, begun when writer’s block hit hard around Chapter Thirteen, abandoned and forgotten when she realized the only way things could end.
But now they have ended. And the question resurges: now what?
Of course, she knows what is next: editing. Proofing. Cover design. Social media presence. Query letters, hundreds of them. A hundred different attempts to answer the question: “Why should you read my book?”
Why should they read her book? How can she know that, when she doesn’t know why she wrote it? She wrote it because it felt necessary. The need was fundamental, imperative, agonizing: the writer’s need to create.
Perhaps creation is the point, she wonders. Perhaps I should let go of the need to share, she thinks. Perhaps the process of taking the book to an audience is not worth it: the process of seeing the book commodified, reduced to genre plus twist, maybe even edited for marketability. And all for the barest chance of reaching someone who needs to read it, and changing his life.
This is very much how I felt when I finished the first draft of my book, The Goer [link], in 2014. After proofreading it a couple of times, I chose to go forward and look for a literary agent. In 2016, with no offers in hand, I resolved to self-publish. I’d heard that the publishing world tends to require writers to build their own platform and market their own work anyway, so why not cut out the middle-man?
How did I do? Well, I put my book online for free in webpage form (now extinct), and put it up for sale as an e-book on LeanPub. I know a handful of friends who read the free version.
To date, the e-book has been purchased three times.
My friend, I do not write this as an author who made it.
In large part, this is because I hit that big question, and stumbled. Why should they read my book? It’s female queer new-adult fantasy written by someone who’s neither female nor queer. Why should anyone read that? What answer can I give, except “Look, I made this, you can experience a part of my heart”?
One effect this experience did have on me: I began to think. I asked myself why fiction matters, where this compulsion comes from that makes writers create, why people like to read made-up stuff. Entertainment is part of it, sure. But the answer that came to me is that all of us are trying to be understood.
When an author breaks the silence of her first blank page, it’s an act of hope. She’s thinking: maybe someone will understand this. When a reader in the fiction aisle picks up a book that caught his eye, he thinks: maybe this story will understand me.
In the process of writing, a writer loses control: there is always a gap between what the writer intended at the outset and what she actually creates. In the process of reading, a reader loses control: the story can never hit in the same way twice. And there’s something there, in that gap of lost control, that lets a message pass between a writer and a reader. A message that’s not in the words, but in the space between the words.
This idea took hold in my mind. It grew into something bigger: a way for a writer to understand her work, understand what impact her work can have in the world—and, if she wants to change that impact, to change her writing to make it so.
I wanted to show writers that their art doesn’t have to be a lonely mystery. It can be a united mystery, one that connects them to their readers. And in some ways, it doesn’t need to be mysterious at all. There is an answer to what art is for—or rather, what art can be used for, what it can do and how it can do it.
With that idea fixed in my mind, I sat down to write How to Do Things with Stories.
I wrote this book for writers who wonder why. I wrote this book for writers who want to take action.
I wrote this book for writers who have published, writers who have written, and writers who have not yet begun. I wrote this book for me.
Now, I offer How to Do Things with Stories to you. It’s available now to read in its entirety: for free if you prefer, or, for CAD $5.