The Story You Don't See

When I first started writing, it never occurred to me to explain why I wrote. I felt it was so obvious. The stories spoke for themselves, I was sure. I was sure from the time I was a kid that this was what I must do and I never thought of doing anything else. My stories had a purpose. But after 10 years of priggish, condescending behavior that seemed to show no grasp of the stories, I realized exactly that. People didn't quite know what they were about. They had missed the point altogether, because they were used to reading a different kind of story normally. 

After all, a glance through would show that I didn't use the arcs and writing techniques that are used in pretty much every fiction book. Most of the time those books are all the same. So I MUST have been an amateur and didn't do this because I had a lot to learn about writing. They would also misunderstand things that appeared because they were used to skimming quickly through a book and forming a socially correct, glib, random opinion. Things went downhill from there. Downhill for them quite as much as for me, since if you mouth off about someone's work when it's clear you don't even know what's in it, you run the risk of looking unbelievably stupid. My books are not to be read hastily and judged flippantly, with a bit of an attitude. My books are about something. 

When I write, I visualize a world--sets, hairstyles, weather, certain facial expressions, and the things I hear the characters say to each other. That's because my brain is responding to stimuli about people and what they're doing in some dimension, some genre where a kind of person is congregating. Far from being about me or my real-life relationships, the books are about a whole other set of people altogether. What set of people depends on the world I feel drawn to explore. I try to write the story that I feel is essentially there. What all the other author's stories are really about, really trying to say. What is the basic "story" being told by epic fantasy? By historical romance? Works set in an obscure setting like 1600s Spain? Bleak, harsh tales about humans, mutants, and survival? That's the story I'm trying to get at and show clearly when I set about doing a book. Because entertainment is great, but these stories can often conceal or disguise the reader's motives for being here and reading this book. I want to draw out the gut root of the story and reveal it. 

And there will be more updates.