It is a great burden to be a writer.

In my mind is a story. In the story are characters I’m certain you’ll love, terrors to make you cringe, events to astonish you, battles to impress you, and twists to delight you.

There are demons and deities, castles, cities, nations, and plots.

It is my job to take these various stimulii, which are clearer in my mind than any memories I possess (and some might argue clearer to me than the present world in which I live), and condense them into mere words which are meant to express all the tragedy, horror, and wonder of a million worlds.

Writer’s block, if there is such a thing, doesn’t manifest to me as the inability to think of anything to write. It manifests as the inability to choose what to write from among the thousands of possibilities glittering before me like so many grains of sand on a beach in the morning sun.

Out of those grains, one might build a sandcastle or any other structure.

My problem is that I want to build a sand galaxy.

You can see how choosing which grain of sand with which to begin might be, in itself, a staggering choice.

Let’s say I have a complete outline of how the plot unfolds. I know the names of all of the characters, where they live, what their motives are. I know how they will affect each other, and how the story ends.

Great, it’s time to put pen to paper, right?

Sit down to write your first scene, and suddenly you discover there are a hundred more choices to make still. Movie directors have to choose their camera angle; writers choose point of view. Omnipotent? Omniscient? Limited 3rd person?

Even the answer to that is not the end of self-guessing. I usually choose limited 3rd person which is most common for novelized fiction. Then you have another question:

Which character do you use? Why that character and not another one?

How much of his thoughts and feelings do you portray? How much of what other characters do does he notice?

Movie directors have actors to help them portray characters. My building blocks are just words. In a few clacks of the keyboard, I must convey body language, attire, facial expression, mood, hopes and fears. Watch or consider Harrison Ford’s performance during the opening of The Fugitive. Now try to describe, with words, everything the character wore, did, felt, said, and thought.

I know how I want the scene to go, but what is the very first line of dialog? What’s the very last? What is the final impression with which I leave the reader? Do I bludgeon with a single-line relevation? Or ‘fade out’ with a pre-established emotion?

A writer has to decide what the scenery is, where the props go, what the lighting and sound feels like, what time of day it is. If you write science fiction or fantasy, the choices are even bigger:

Tattooine has two suns.

The world of Eberron has nine moons.

The Lifetrees of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos are biological Dyson spheres.

A whole universe could exist underwater, where “planets” are instead pockets of air and earth. Or on Mount Olympus. Or like in Dan Simmons’ novel Ilium, involve Mount Olympus on Mars and in mythology.

The scope of time must be decided. Do you cover the turning of a single age, like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time? Or instead, you could choose to cover not one, but the rise and fall of two SEPERATE galactic empires, like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, or Orson Scott Card’s The Worthing Saga.

If your story takes place on a world much like ours, do you provide a map? Even so, Robert Jordan’s map doesn’t include Seanchan lands or the Aiel Waste. George R. R. Martin’s map doesn’t include the Ten Free Cities or the Dothraki lands.

And in all those myriad, infinite choices, you still have to know who does what and why and how.

Above is pictured Atlas, the Greek god bearing the world on his shoulders. If a picture is worth a thousand words, I would change that image slightly to reflect the Writer’s Burden.

Instead of a world, the figure would be holding up a galaxy.

Share:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•