I Get Questions
In Today's Journal
* Quote of the Day
* I Get Questions
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
I Get Questions
A young writer friend email me with a pair of questions yesterday, two of the biggies:
"Is making art (in this case, stories) pointless? I mean does it help people at all?"
Those questions are straight out of the critical mind, and every writer (artist, etc.) who ever lived has experienced them.
Is it pointless to write stories, novels, etc.?
No, of course it isn't.
Do our stories help people at all?
Yes, of course they do. At a bare minimum, they provide readers with a few minutes or hours of entertainment and escape.
Just a few days ago as I write this, a writer commented on a post that she had read The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls and hated them. Those, a novella and a novel, are two of my absolute favorite Hemingway stories.
I've been entertained and helped in numerous ways, including as a fiction writer, by reading Hemingway's work over the years. I still reread it often.
Here's the whole thing:
How can you or I or anyone else know how a story will affect another human being?
Every human being has different values and beliefs, different experiences, different tastes, different accomplishments and wounds, different good and bad baggage, etc.
No way can we possibly know how anything at all, including our stories, will affect anyone other than ourselves.
So (like everyone else) we simply do what we do because it's what we want to do and what we love to do.
We paint a picture and hang it up in a gallery. Or we write a short story or a novella or a novel and publish it. And we move on to paint the next painting or write the next story.
Some people who read one or our stories won't like it, but they'll love another one.
Distance yourself from Outcome. Rest assured, your story will have either no effect at all or a similar effect or a completely different effect on every reader out there. Because each reader is a different person.
The best you can hope for is that your story entertains someone for a few minutes or a few hours. If it does, it might also help them. But it has no chance to help those readers whom it doesn't entertain.
On one reader the story will have minimal impact. Maybe he'll enjoy it as a few minutes' or hours' entertainment, but it won't rock his world.
So what? Chances are, you'll never know.
Another reader will read the same story and something in it will bring up a fond memory. Or a bad memory.
So what? Chances are, you'll never know.
Another reader will read the story and something about it will change his life forever.
So what? Chances are, you'll never know.
As writers, individually or collectively, we have no way of knowing the affect or impact our stories will have. All we can do is write them and put them out there, then write the next one.
I don't even recommend taking upon yourself the burden (and sense of importance) that your story might "help" somebody.
Just write the story (if you want to), then publish it and go on to the next story.
Write your pleasure or your pain, what makes you ecstatic or happy or sad or frightened or confident. Then publish it and don't worry about it.
Writers are neither the servants of nor the masters of the readers. Nor should we ever want to be. We're storytellers. We're entertainers.
We also live in a wonderful time, a whole new golden age of publishing. A golden age of fiction.
We have computers so we don't have to hammer out our creations on old manual (or even electric) typewriters.
As Heinlein himself wrote about his "Business Habits" (Heinlein's Rules) right after he posted them in his essay in Of Worlds Beyond (Fantasy Press, 1947)
"... they are amazingly hard to follow—which is why there are so few professional writers and so many aspirants.... But if you will follow them, it matters not how you write, you will find some editor somewhere, sometime, so unwary or so desperate for copy as to buy the worst old dog you, I, or anybody else, can throw at him."
And today, we don't even have to go through editors or publishing houses. Today we can go straight to the readers.
So if you've been bitten by the fiction-writing bug, count your blessings, write whatever you want, and publish it. Someone out there is just waiting for your story.
Of Interest
SAVE 90%: Screenwriting for Novelists Bundle This is not an endorsement, and I'm not offering an opinion either way. Just passing along the information.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 800
Writing of Blackwell Ops 45: Sam Granger | Continuing Along the Ghost Trail
Day 1…… 2637 words. To date…… 2637
Day 2…… 3648 words. To date…… 6285
Day 3…… 3483 words. To date…… 9768
Fiction for May………………………... 81505
Fiction for 2025………………………. 459918
Nonfiction for May………………........ 23680
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 124770
2025 consumable words…………….. 578178
Average Fiction WPD (May)……...... 2911
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 11
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 27
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..... 115
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 297
Short story collections……………………. 29
Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.
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Questions are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. But please limit yourself to the topics of writing and publishing.
Great post! Well, does it really matter how people react to my stories? I believe yes, everyone wants to be loved for their works and everyone wants to find meaning in their "job"... But writing stories is not a job. It is entertainment. And care about what people think is contraproductive. We can't tell how people would read our stories, and we don't even have anything to direct or have an influence on how they read our stories... The only thing we can do is to entertain ourselfes; and out our works out there.
And I don't think editors could add so much so our works would be better. Maybe copyeditors can help, but editors are readers with their own tastes... Sometimes they help. I wrote a story about kids, and when I was about publishing it, my friend read it and said that they were in the wrong age for their school... This problem was easy to correct. But same thing: it was like copyediting. Not really editing.
The main thing I think is to entertain ourselves. To be productive. To make time for writing. And write. Of course there will be many people love the stories and many people won't... Who knows which group will be the louder one? We only can write our next stories, after all.
Outcomes! Yes! As soon as you start thinking about the outcomes you burden the story! It's just an extension of "plodding"...Thinking about controlling how the story should go, only now you are thinking about not only controlling the characters, but trying to control the reader!
I think (at least for me), that we've heard the anecdotes of writers of the past, where they tell about the child or adult going through some unimaginable problem/situation and later writing to the author/artist and thanking them for the book/art that truly saved them/helped them in their time of need. And so we want that, too. That affirmation that we are a superhero saving lives with out little words.
Releasing that weight of saving the world, or even just one person, is dropping a burden of rocks we didn't even know we were carrying! Now we are riding the story/art at speed, into the sunset and not carrying the mule (or ox!) on our backs.
Thanks Harvey for the fantastic, as always, advice.