I’m about to say something really cliche, but bear with me.
Writing is a journey, and it should be.
So why the cliche? This comes from a conversation I was having this past weekend with my wife, Molli, about how challenging it is to write a novel or a story. Even when the words come speeding out my brain like I’m on a race track, the process isn’t easy, and I don’t believe it should be.
If I’m doing my job correctly, telling a story shares pieces of myself with you. If the soul is an actual thing that can be shared, then storytelling (and honestly art and other forms of creative expression) is just that. It’s sharing.
It doesn’t matter if the characters feel similar to others. It doesn’t matter if the plot feels familiar or the themes the same as something else. What makes it unique is that these characters and events are filtered through the lens of me.
I am the only me in existence and thus, everything filtered through me looks different than it would running through someone else’s filter or soul.
Sharing a piece of myself with you should be challenging as it is a journey. It’s sharing with you my journey.
As a reader, one of the issues I have with series that run super-long (15+ books) by authors who pump them out 4-5 a year is that they lack soul. In my experience as a reader, this happens one of two ways:
- The author is writing too fast to pay attention to the journey. They aren’t sharing themselves with the reader.
- The series began with soul, but somewhere along the way, the author lost sight of the journey.
As to the first, well, I think any time you do a rush job it shows. You can write quickly and still spin a good tale, but some writers create too fast. Creativity needs space to breathe and grow.
As to the second, the later stories lack the author’s filter and thus, the sharing of themselves in the story. They become formulaic and tired, repeats of the same situations and sometimes the same damn descriptions! (Yes, I’ve seen multiple authors copy and paste descriptions from book 2 to book 15 or even book 5. I’m looking at your, Jean Auel.)
Writing a trilogy, let alone a series, can be challenging. The muddy-middle that authors run into in a novel can hit a second book like a hurricane if an author’s not careful. If an author’s planned their trilogy thoroughly, it doesn’t have to look like a disaster area. Stretch this idea across a 30 novel series and holy smokes! If the author doesn’t have the middle books seriously planned in advance, no wonder they get so lost in the weeds.
That isn’t necessarily what’s happening to these longer series that I’ve read, but it feels that way. Out of desperation to fill in the middle, the plot becomes rehashed and tired, the characters stale.
As a writer, I don’t believe my job is to just “entertain” but to make you think and feel. It’s my job to say, “Hey, this character’s a space captain but her journey to Mars is a nice parallel to when I left home as a teen. Maybe it’s a nice parallel to your life too but even if it isn’t, here’s a piece of my story and what it taught me or made me feel.”
So if the writing’s easy, I often question whether it’s something I’ll enjoy.
Note that I’m not saying the story will be bad. Everyone enjoys different things for different reasons and goodness knows those series with 30+ books sell like hot cakes, especially in the romance and mystery genres, but they are not for me. I need more from my fiction.
That’s why I give more in the stories I’m writing, because I firmly believe in writing for myself first. Everyone else is just a happy bonus, travelers who came along with me for a journey.
