With the last post /posts/writing-about-technical-writing about the kind of writing I do every day for work (and work related) project, I thought it would be fun to muse, briefly about the kind of writing, I do for me.
That sounded pretentious. But it's less pretentious, I think, than saying I write fiction for art.
Writing fiction, genre fiction at that, for me, is about talking to people directly about the way they see their worlds, about the way that we construct theories of reality, about complex systems, and maybe about all of the little thoughts and ideas that sound too foolish or too simple to justify saying plainly but are nevertheless important to say.
Fiction is a luxury, and perhaps there is why it is so crucial.
Saying, "I want to have a career as a fiction writer," seems not very grounded in reality, and potentially even more pretentious. So here I am. I write professionally (documentation,) and I write science fiction because it's the best way to say things that I think need saying. I'll probably even get around to publishing fiction "professionally," if I can, in the next couple of years, but I don't think I'll ever really give up the professional writing either. Writing fiction, I think, is a piece of a much larger puzzle. So there.
Two fiction writing related updates:
1. I wrote fiction Tuesday morning on the train. I've been working on other things for a few weeks/months, and hadn't been able to squeeze any fiction writing in for a long time. It was good to get back to it, good to realize that I'd finished a section that had been nagging me, and could start fresh, and good to remember than I'm well into the final little stretch of this book. Just need to finish now. I'll probably be posting more about this soon.
2. I'm really amazed by how much my "work writing" has effected and improved my fiction writing. I don't think I was ever, exactly, a bad writer, but I've certainly become a better and more efficient writer, and despite the fact that fiction writing is probably the thing that has "slipped" the most for me in the last couple of years, it feels good to know that I'm still getting better at it.