writing

Guest Post by Leona Wisoker: Ideas and Fear; or, The Fear of Ideas

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(I'd like to thank Leona Wisoker, a talented writer who's also had me blogging at her blog, for this contribution on writing, ideas, and fear – something a lot of us know of.  I reccomend her blog as she has some fascinating insights.)

I used to be paralyzed by the thought that I had nothing worth saying, no skills with which to say it, and nobody who would want to read it anyway. Even after landing a four-book contract deal, publishing a handful of short stories, and running a relatively regular blog for almost two years now, I still hear those statements in my head nearly every day:

It's a fluke. It's not real. People are just being nice to me. If I was a 'real' writer, I'd be signed with a Big Name Press, like Tor or Baen. I'm an upstart and I'm going to get squashed very very soon now….

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Why Do We Have Such A Creative Explosion on Mobile and DLC?

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(I'm still thinking about DLC and mobile content as of late.  Blame my new Android.)

I sort through the DLC on my console and am amazed at what's there (and at times appalled, but mostly amazed).  I look through the online store on my smartphone and am overwhelmed with choices.  When it comes to books the content available to me, especially via eBooks is stunning.

It seems that, media, software, and gamewise we're in a kind of explosion of creativity and productivity.  There's just a huge amount of stuff everywhere – often good stuff – that we can download, play, read, or listen too.

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Go Farther: Fiction Needs Irrelevance

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When we build a world for our fictions, games, and shows, we construct cultures.  Cultures explain why people do what they do, how they think, why they eat, how they war, how they make peace, and more.  Culture is unavoidable when you make a setting – one could even argue that characters are often expressions of their cultures.

When we build these cultures we're often thinking about important things.  We want to know why characters believe as they do.  We want to explain why characters go where they go and do what they do.  We want to explain why magic is the prerogative of the ruling class, why there's a different language spoken on this distant space station, and so on.  We want to explain what matters – in short, cultures explain the Big Plot.

This is short-sighted.

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