Having Something to Say

[the_flea_king]

I’m hav­ing a lot of luck writ­ing words lately.  There’s just one prob­lem;  they’re not meet­ing my rig­or­ous qual­ity stan­dards out the gate.

I’m torn between want­ing to be a good writer and a paid one.  Is there a dif­fer­ence?  Can you live on $10,000 every 5 years?  Quality takes time, and time is money.  The two are not mutu­ally exclu­sive, but they don’t nec­es­sar­ily go hand-​​in-​​hand.  If I am forced to choose my cri­te­ria for suc­cess, it would be a large fan­base and prof­itable projects  enough to keep me in the lifestyle I have come to expect. You know, vis­it­ing the den­tist once every ten years and trav­el­ing to con­ven­tions every five.

Like most every other aspir­ing writer you know, I wouldn’t mind mak­ing a liv­ing from my efforts.  Actually, when busi­ness is good on the free­lance web front, I’m not that con­cerned about it.  When busi­ness is weak like it has been lately, I’m all “OMG, gotta write six short sto­ries and try to sell them all.”  Because short fic­tion is so profitable.

No, I know, short fic­tion isn’t going to pay the bills.  And that would be why I wrote a deeply flawed novel this month!

I’m con­flicted a lot about what I’m turn­ing out because I’m not sure that what I have to say mat­ters.  I don’t always even know what I want to say.  Since col­lege, I have this deep sense that I live too much on sur­face thoughts.  Critical think­ing and form­ing of deeply held opin­ions isn’t some­thing I get up to as much as I did when I was younger.    My thoughts rarely go beyond “how can I pay the rent next month with­out dip­ping into sav­ings?”  I don’t spend a lot of time pon­der­ing free­dom vs. secu­rity or what it means to be grow­ing older in a soci­ety that increas­ingly val­ues youth above all other per­sonal traits. (Freedom prob­a­bly, and “it sucks”.  Now where’s my Nobel?)

You have to do some deep think­ing in order to form the opin­ions that are the core of “hav­ing some­thing to say.”  Especially if you plan on offer­ing any kind of unique insight.  For instance, “mur­der is bad” is a lit­tle played out.  However, “mur­der is okay when it’s a clown” is, ignor­ing the moral impli­ca­tions of such a mes­sage, at least some­what original.

So I’m work­ing on that.  I’m also back to think­ing a lot about sto­rycraft.  Because I don’t always know what to do next when I write a story. I don’t know implic­itly what makes a suc­cess­ful story, at its core.

What I’d like to do in the next year is learn story.  Learn my craft, so that I can focus less on “how do I end this story so it feels sat­is­fy­ing?” and more on hav­ing some­thing more to say.   I keep com­ing back to this issue of sto­rycraft.   I know I can do it by acci­dent. I would just like to be able to do it consistently.

I want to be the depend­able writer edi­tors can count on in a pinch.   I want to be the guy you go to for an odd anthol­ogy theme, know­ing that you’re going to get some­thing fresh and enter­tain­ing.  I  don’t want to be boxed into a par­tic­u­lar sub­genre (epic fan­tasy, hard SF, etc).  Like I am in a more broad sense, I want to be a gen­er­al­ist when it comes to the things I write about.

I actu­ally really want to write on-​​spec nov­els.  I want to play in other uni­verses not my own.   I want to write for video games. I want to write comics.  Screenplays. I even want to write more nonfiction.

Do you have tips for mas­ter­ing story?  How to make those choices in the course of a story to make it have that “oomph” in the end that makes a reader value the time they spent inside your head?  Share them in the comments.

Ten years into my writ­ing and I still feel like a jour­ney­man at best.   The most impor­tant trait of being a writer some­times feels like stubbornness.

Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there.