One of the hardest things in life is to set aside your morals, principles, and values in order to succeed, or just get things done.
This is true in writing just as it is for any other endeavor.
Every writer has a bias or set of principles by which they’ll craft their perfect story. Some will say passionate drafting is the key, others will say logic, believability, plot, and premise are more important.
The key is to know what works, why it works, and how to use it.
I tend to favor certain tools like plot over others such as whimsy or blindly following the muse.
If all you ever use are the same favorite tools over and over again, you will never develop or improve your skills.
Practice makes perfect, but I don’t entirely subscribe to the idea that you just have to keep writing to “get all the bad ideas out.” It is true that you have to fail sometimes in order to succeed. If that’s what is meant by “getting the bad ideas out” then I agree. But quality of my ideas has very little to do quantity or output for me. My inspiration comes from research and understanding literary techniques.
Having a string of bad ideas doesn’t mean you’re going to have good ones next. You have to know what to look for, your tools, and how to use them.
The best literary techniques often share features with other topics like marketing and product design. A creative person, artist, or writer often doesn’t seen the connection between marketing, product design, and creativity but it is undeniably there.
As an example, creative people champion originality. The problem is that every person has a unique voice but that does not make their story or ‘product’ original.
Whereas an expert marketer might look for holes in the market and say, “There’s no product that exists here. Nobody has done this yet! Let’s do it!”
So it is entirely possible for a marketing gimp to be more creative than an author. This is because writers rarely look for holes in the market to fill. They are too concerned with their own little brand of derivitive. “My favorite books are murder mysteries! Therefore, I’m going to write books just like my favorite murder mystery author!”
But they already exist, and hold that position in the market. So what can you do differently?
Look for holes. Look for weakness. Look for things that don’t exist, or exist but are done very poorly. You need to think opportunity. Be a rascal, a weasel, a fox. Think like a military strategist.
But to do that you have to get beyond some difficult mental barriers.
Our human culture is engaged in a battle between knowledge and beliefs. Guess what? Belief wins every time. Ignorance powers belief. Because to believe something, you’ve ruled out the other options and made a decision. Belief is undermined by knowledge. Knowledge opens up the possibilities. It opens doors where you thought all were closed.
As writers we often champion knowledge and put it on a pedestal. Leave belief to the priests, shamans, snake-oil salesmen, voodoo practitioners, witch doctors, etc.
Have we forgotten our own kind? Writers of fiction are in the business of building mythology and belief! We too are the priests and shamans!
We’re selling a world and a set of characters. To sell them effectively we have to make them believable. We have to construct the perfect lie, the perfect sales pitch for our creation.
Learn all the tools available to you. Learn when to use one vs. another. How do you know? Whichever one makes your story better.
Remember that the goal of writing is communication, even in fiction.
When it comes to communication, use what works.
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