Writing
In my spare moments I’m a writer, a crafter of worlds or something equally pretentious. But yes, a writer. Most of my writing in recent years has been of a decidedly amateurish bent, focused on the creation of science fiction and fantasy (not that such things are by their nature amateurish, of course; merely my attempts at them). The ideas spawned therein were at least partly based on my own beliefs and experiences, as all such writing often is, but I did try to explore alternative views in my writing. It was usually an exercise in idealism and its conflict with reality, with a little bit of political theorising mixed in.
There are a few books that I want to write, and will write soon, that could loosely be called a series since they’re all set in the same “universe” or continuum, a universe I called the Knighthood universe. This might change though given the direction it’s taken since that title was conceived.
The original attempt was a lengthy novel alternatively called Knighthood and The Tears of the Gods, written whilst I was still at university. It reached 300 pages with no end in sight before I realised it was going nowhere and tried again. The second draft was equally voluminous and equally interminable. I’d hit that problem that writers occasionally find themselves facing, of having a great idea but no conclusion. I stopped writing.
I started again with a story set about 1500 years earlier in my universe’s chronology, which I had fairly well laid out in scope if not detail. That one is currently on hold as well while I focus on work, but it was progressing nicely when I stopped working on it.
When I’m not writing serious novels, I write something that most people look on with derision. I write Fan Fiction.
No, I don’t mean all that crazy, badly written pornographic rubbish that most people consider to be the entire outré of the fanfiction world. I write meaningful, complex and well-rounded stories that happen to use characters someone else created. Fan fiction is a nice way to hone your writing skills, a means to learn how to keep characters consistent and develop good plots without having to think up all the niggly details involved in worldbuilding.
A good writing session may well force you to examine ideas that you aren’t necessarily responsive to. Sometimes, dealing with the motivations of the “bad guy”, or even a good-guy who holds ideas that you yourself disagree with, can give you a better appreciation of how the other side thinks. The joy of writing is that you can take on this ideas, examine them from every angle and then discard them again – or keep them, if you find yourself agreeing with them.
And that’s what I do.
There’ll be some links to writing resources and basic details of my earlier ideas on here sooner or later.
