Musings on Writing and Reality

As enigmatic as the title seems, it’s really not so bad. What I mean is that this post will be one of perhaps several collections of thoughts, probably slightly disjointed, and maybe not getting anywhere much. As the title suggests, this one will be some thoughts I had about writing and reality. Warning to readers: It’s going to be rather hypothetical. You’ll see what I mean by that. Well, if you’re ready (or have quit reading already, whichever it might be), here goes…


First of all, a bit of thought on writing. I myself am writing a novel, I guess, and was recently in a bit of a block on about page 32 over a battle scene. I’d been thinking about what I wanted to happen and I realized something about the style of writing, or what was being told, wasn’t quite right, or didn’t give the right feeling away. I thought about it for a while, and then just as I was reading my book (I’m on the Wheel of Time series right now, excellent series everyone, you should read it), I think I figured out what was wrong. They always tell you, “Show, don’t tell.” Oh, I’d been having a lot of detail and all, but as I was reading I realized the more effective method that Jordan uses. He tells everything from the character’s point of view, even though it’s written in 3rd person. Something about showing emotions and reactions the way that character sees it and feels it gives some more life to the thing, and more reality to the people. That’s what I’d been doing wrong—I’d been writing more from an outside perspective, as a bystander would see it, and trying to communicate emotion by expression and how the people said things. While that is effective at times, somehow just showing how one person sees, and feels, and the reasons for their actions, gives a depth and reality to it that can’t be paralleled by simply telling how it looks.

And, of course, fiction needs to seem so much like reality that you can’t tell it much apart, or it should in my perspective. I say this for two reasons. The first is that I read fiction pretty much just to get away from RL. To read about a different place, a different time, a different world, to lose myself in it, is the purpose of this pastime. Maybe I’m a bit too daydreamy, but that’s the way it goes. The day I stop would be the day I find answers, or finally settle down in life, I guess. Maybe.

The second reason is something a little harder to understand, even for me. (It’s where the “hypothetical” comes in.) I always like to think of the worlds in books as real, in a way. Untouchable except through books, and authors and their writings the link between, and the authors historians rather than imaginers. Only perhaps these worlds don’t exist until they think of them, but once they do they are fully fleshed, and the people, and then suddenly it’s real and the author can only gaze down and wait for things to unfold. That would be an interesting explanation for all those times when authors say they didn’t know who was going to die only then when it happened they knew that was how it had to be. And then how long the world lives depends on how many people believe in it, or at least are drawn to it. The thing is, we never really have any way to prove anything. Apart from our senses and what we communicate with each other, and who’s to say our senses aren’t lying? And what does it mean to be real—and how can we even know the world we live in is real the way we think it is?

I guess I shouldn’t branch out so much to create strange paradoxes. It’s just entrancing to think that there’s something more out there than what we see. Likely all of this is just fancy, but it’s nice to think, what if? At times. And indeed, what if? There is so much we still do not know about, well, everything, and so it will be for a long time, I think. When the world still holds so many secrets, why not let your daydreaming run wild? It is part of what makes us human, after all. We have done it for thousands of years. Remember not to fall so far from our beginnings that you lose your wonder. As was once said, “I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean.” Let your dreams run.