Writing rant

"Oh, for a muse of fire” -William Shakespeare, Henry V. Prologue.

There's a story I started working on a number of years ago. I planned it to be my third novel, mostly because the first one I had started writing was meant to be two volumes. Then apathy set in.. It has been a decade of wallowing in the muse of apathy and I have been trying to find ways to get out of the slump. Oddly enough, this third novel has been haunting my dreams for many nights now, trying to force me to write something down.  This rant is supposed to
force me to write about stuff, maybe break my mental block. So here are some thoughts on writing and I suppose most of it applies to art mediums in general.

Writing is more than simply the act of putting pen to paper or filling in the keystrokes. A lot of bad novels, short stories and poetry have been written by people who think that it's easy. Writing is a contemplation, an act of creation requiring some degree of talent and beyond that, a degree of focus. I've known several writers, some good, some not so good and a few who should have pursued other career options. I am not sure where I fall in that range but I would like to believe that I am a good writer currently bereft of discipline and focus.

In order to create a new world, or to recreate an old one, a writer needs to give serious thought to all aspects of the land, not just the ground. There is the geography, both physical and political; the social structures; the languages and cultures; religions; fashions; taboos.. and on and on in finitum. A writer who does not think on all these things finds himself drawing too much on what he/she thinks they know. For new worlds, starting from scratch means
starting with nothing and creating new ideas, new ideals, new standards.. (ever wonder why so much sci-fi always has the inhabitants as descendants of Earth? makes things easy) For recreating worlds, knowing the location and period you are writing about is very important. Keeping timelines straight means avoiding awkward conflicts in the story and criticism once you're finished. Some writers spend more time doing research than actually writing, and I would suppose that if you are not writing about something you know intimately, or creating from scratch, then that should be the case.

A number of authors have said similar things so I will claim it as a quotation but not from who specifically, since I don't recall who said it first, but 'there are no new stories, just new ways of telling the same ones over again.'  Whenever someone comes out with something truly new, truly innovative, it fails for years. Cyberpunk was a fringe form of sci-fi for ages before William
Gibson brought it to the forefront. Tolkien is seen as the father of modern fantasy, though again he was not the first, just the one who made it fashionable. Would you rather be rich and famous like Stephen King and Danielle Steele, or innovative like William Gibson, or controversial like William S. Burroughs?

There is little difference between writing a social fiction and a historical fiction. The period is different, so the research branches off in different areas, but you are still writing about the human spirit in the known world. Science fiction and fantasy go beyond that to explore the human spirit in the unknown world. This applies even when the characters are not human. Take Tad Williams' Tailchaser's Song, where the story is about a cat. Anthropomorphics is the giving of human characteristics to other animals. The moment we assign cognitive awareness to any animal we cross the line of assigning that animal human characteristics. Science can tell us all sorts of wonderful things about animal intelligence, but self-awareness (“I think therefore I am”) is an advanced concept that without the ability to communicate directly, we will never be able to show exists in any creature incapable of complete self-destruction. This is, of course, just my opinion.

I want to write something new, something previously unwritten. I don't want to tell the same stories over again. I think that is part of my mental block. I know that when I was working on my first novel, I stopped mostly because while I was writing, I was also reading and it seemed to me that often I would read stuff that was almost exactly like what I was planning to write, so I would stop to think about some fundamental changes and eventually spent more time re-editing the first two chapters than writing new material and then it all came to a grinding halt. This third novel is not a new story, but perhaps it is more than just a new telling of an old story. Perhaps it is fear which stops me from writing it. Fear that this is just another angle to something we have all read countless times times before. Fear is another topic though for another rant.