What Do I Know About Writing?

So what do I know about writing?

Ta-daa, look, see I make my fingers tap on these lettered keys and words come out on the screen like some kind of advanced magic.

That's not enough is it?

Well I'm moderately good at the whole spelling and grammar thing. I need to be able to do that or apparently nobody will take me seriously. I love spellcheckers, me.

I do quite a bit of non-fictional writing for work. I'm a lecturer, so I write lectures, tutorial material, assignments and hundreds and hundreds of emails. Not the same, I need to know about stories. Have I written any stories?  Yes, two.

Several years ago I wrote a short story called "The Magnificent Octopus". It's not actually about an octopus, it's about a hedgehog. It has a proper "hero journey" structure.

Also a couple of years ago I wrote a children's rhyming story called "The Wobbit Of Jesmond Dene".

Not a lot of experience I admit, and neither of them are published, although I did submit "The Wobbit" to an agency and had an editor look it over. And pull it apart. Maybe my grammar is not as good as I think it is.

Is it possible to absorb storytelling skills by osmosis? My Mum had a story published and wrote several others. My Dad has written a couple too. I also have a really good friend who has won awards for his published sci-fi and fantasy work. Surely this can rub off?

Somewhat bizarrely, I have been teaching about the use of stories in games for about 15 years now, not in great depth, but as a tangential subject to games design. I know some stuff about the mechanics of writing stories.  I know stuff about:

• The willing suspension of disbelief
• Character association
• The Deus Ex Machina
• The three-act structure
• Character creation 
• World building
• The Hero's journey story structure
• Polti's 36 dramatic situations
• Protagonists and antagonists
• "Show don't tell"

...and I have read Robert McKee's seminal book "story" about writing film screenplays.

Actually when I look at that list is seems somewhat impressive.  I hope it's not a case of those who can't do, teach. I have been reading some advice about writing comic book scripts, and one clear message that is coming through is "learn your craft" and all these bits of knowledge will be useful.

And another thing: a few years ago I wrote an article that got published in a magazine. Actually I wrote and published three, but one is particularly relevant, because it was about how to create better stories for computer games, and it was published in the national trade magazine for the games industry in the UK. In some ways, coming from a man who has never written a story for a published game it was a bit arrogant of me to write it. The thing that amazed me was that after it was published I was contacted by a man who's job it was to write stories for games, a man who has worked on triple-A games, and worked with Douglas Adams on Starship Titanic. He liked my article and seemed to think the points I made were spot on the money. Seems like, maybe, just possibly I know a thing or two about the theory.

What I lack is practice. Definitely need practice. How do you practice writing stories? By writing stories. There's no other way really. If I'm going to write them I may as well submit them to see if any publishers like them, and if not I might get some feedback along the way on how to get better. That would be nice.

Finally, I have one thing which is neither experience of knowledge - creative drive. I don't have the obsessive drive that some writers have, that they have to be writing. A writer writes. If a writer takes a break from writing they often find they end up doing some other kind of writing.  I don't have this specific drive, but I have what is probably the same thing in another disguise, a drive to create. I cannot help this one, I get restless if I don't have a creative outlet. Usually it's safer if I have more than one otherwise the pressure can still build up.  For a lot of my life this has been vented into musical ventures, recording, songwriting, writing ceilidh tunes, and so on, but it also comes out in creating new modules and degrees at work, and in creating things like murder mystery evenings. And sometimes writing. This is not my first blog, I have holiday diaries, poetry, songs, articles, philosophical monographs and many more. Some finished, but not all. I need to create, and creating worlds, characters and stories are part of that drive.

In my most delusional moments I imagine that I can create world-shattering captivating stories and will become a household name. In my more rational moments I realise I am a rank amateur and that this is something that will take work. Work, patience and a resilience to rejection. That's OK I think, and if it stops being OK, I can just stop.  

I'm going to leave it there for this time, but I have at least one more blog post in me about this, even before I get started, possibly two. I can talk about the plan, such as I have one, of how to approach this, and I can talk about the mechanics of writing comic book scripts, comic book creation and the process of publishing, as I see it at the moment.