As I sit here, watching episodes of a crime drama and checking my social media accounts, I find myself pondering what the purpose of the internet in the business of writers and authors who have taken it upon themselves to handle their own management.
Many of us are disillusioned with the traditional routes for publication and the limitations we are met with when trying to tell our stories. Going through traditional literary agents and publishers means we have to play by their rules--we have to write what they call for, we have to say what they write up for us in press conferences and interviews, and we have to present a certain image that is appropriate for those we work with.
As such, many of us have chosen to take the reins ourselves, and in doing so we have taken to the internet to market ourselves. We use social media and crowd-funding and blogs and commission work to get our names out there, and we publish our bigger works where we can. Sometimes we publish under different names, for a variety of reasons, and sometimes we shout our own names from the rooftops. Either way, we are taking back control of our words and our stories.
I write in a variety of genres, from poetry to horror to romance to fantasy to erotica. I write short stories on commission and for fun, I write novels, I write essays. The essence of this is that I write. Not a day goes by that I don't write something. For any writer, the goal is to write as much and as often as possible. Even if all I write is a few lines of a journal, I keep my brain sharp and my fingers tip-tapping away by writing every. single. day.
Writers are, by nature, shy creatures. We like our solitude, both for creative purposes and because we don't often play well with others. We can put on "the face" for a while, but eventually, being surrounded by the hustle and bustle of other people will overwhelm many of us and we need to get away to process the information we have absorbed. It is very likely, with most people in my life, that they will end up in one of my stories--in one capacity or another.
Sometimes, I will write someone I care about as a protagonist, and sometimes I will write them as a villain. How I feel about the real person usually has no bearing on who they are in the narrative. I like to play with the psychology of my characters--and of their inspirations--to see what I can come up with. It is this method that has taught me so many things about the basic psychology of human beings and why they do what they do. I find it fascinating, and it is my way of understanding people.
Writers have to understand some very odd things. My browser's search history could tell a rather chilling tale, I don't mind telling you! One of the things I have learned to understand is people, on a level I wouldn't have bothered with otherwise. When I write a romance novel, for example, I need to understand why my heroine might choose to have an affair with the tall, dark, handsome stranger, and I can't just ham-fist in a dead husband. It's more complicated than that. When I write a fantasy novel, I need to understand why my hero is initially cold to the companions before warming up to them, and what happens to join them together through trauma.
We need to understand our characters so that we can write them. We need to understand their actions, their behavior, and their motives, or we can't properly express them. To me, that is the difference between good and poor writing. Which is why I avoid certain authors on the scene today--they write what the market demands, sure, but their understanding of their characters is so surface, it may as well not even be there. They don't research properly, they don't delve into the worlds they write, and they don't experience their character's lives.