Most of us who work by the word know there is a world inside your head and a world outside your head.
Other people might not be aware of this. I don’t know. In case they’re not aware, let me explain: You carry an image of the world inside your head. It might be pretty close to the real world, or it might be wildly different. It is never exactly the same.
The world inside your head is shaped not just by your individual experiences, but by everything you read or saw on tv. Humans are creatures of story. The world outside our eyes is often chaotic and meaningless, but inside our head we assign cause and effect that are – or at least try to be – coherent and causal. When we lose the plot, it’s called schizophrenia or various other kinds of mental illness.
But because the plot threads we pick are influenced by who we are, they’re never exactly the same as others. Needless to say those with inner worlds more closely related to the outer world do better in life, so there would seem to be evolutionary pressure that way.
A lot of what politicians and polemicists do is “sell a plot.”
This works for authors too, but first the author needs to find the outer world. Okay, it’s not every author. I’ve met a remarkable number, even in science fiction and fantasy who have very normal, not to say conventional world views. What doesn’t come directly from their eyes comes from mass media, almost unaltered.
It might surprise people to know that these people do better commercially. They might have tons of fallacies in their work (Dan Brown!) but their fallacies accord with the mass-media-culture and either echo it or extend it in a way most people are sure is plausible.
If I hear one more person say how creative J. K. Rowling is and how strange her idea for a magic school is, I’m going to do something everyone will regret. Harry Potter is an amalgam of ideas and stories that have been out for decades. No, not plagiarism. But school for magic is a cliche in my world. And of course her “setting” and even her plotting was just a new spin on Enid Blyton’s boarding school adventures.
Am I disparaging her? Oh, heck no. The books are enjoyable and at least the first three very well written. She totally deserved her success. But wildly creative she’s not.
The wildly creative ones tend to have odd ball thoughts and beliefs that might be accurate but aren’t perceived as such by the population at large.
I’m talking here of people I mentor. Those who are most creative and most out there, often have no clue how to communicate with the people on the other side of their eyes.
And what you believe and think about a lot influences what interests you enough to write about it. Imagine two intersecting circles. A wanna-be writers inner circle of what he likes to write about might be cabbage growing, sex with penguins, and spaceships. Surely you see the only place this intersects the “normal reader” mind is cabbage growing… er… I mean spaceships.
Often there is no intersection. When I edited a small press magazine, i.e. when I was young and stupid, I often got exquisitely written stories about stuff even the author’s mom couldn’t care about. Worse, often this stuff was so bizarre as to make me want brain bleach.
Techniques for writing can be taught. Changing your mind so you can communicate to the public at large, otoh, is far more difficult. And it’s something a mentor can at best nudge not do.
Some people are so fractured it would take a mental health specialist to manage it.
OTOH there are authors who managed it beautifully. Read For Us The Living and then The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and you’ll see the process I’m talking about.
Myself, I’ve been working on it, though being myself it’s backward and sideways. It’s more like I have to give myself permission to write about what I really want to write. I only managed it in the last three books. (Daring Finds, to an extent. Think of it as my sillier self and Darkship Thieves.)
But since writing is communication, this is as important as the “right word.”
According To Hoyt 
Have you BEEN to a grocery store lately? Cabbage growing may be a topic whose audience is just starting to coalesce, and that author could lead the pack … :-)
Spot on and wonderfully insightful, as always. I was noticing just this morning that many of my long-favorite authors — the folks I re-read and then re-read again, then push on my kids and even on strangers at parties — are people whose worldviews I disagree with on a wide variety of topics. But they have worldviews that aren’t *foreign* to me. Just a little different, close enough to still be able to translate between the two places. Clearly, their audience didn’t have to agree with them to become fen. But we had to be able to relate.
(By my count, this post asserts that you have (at least) three hands. Is that how you manage to write so prolifically?)
LikeLike
Am I the only who saw some of the similarities between some of Kipling and the Harry Potter books? Stalky & Co. where the school children are busy dealing with their own affairs without the awareness of the adults; Puck of Pook’s Hill, where the children meet a magical being who teaches them things, and a very little of Jungle Book, where the “child” is capable and competent at dealing with dangers when most adults would say “You’re far too young”?
Perhaps a touch or Narnia, where the children are transported into their magical world to stay by a train (okay a train wreck, but still)?
I thought it was just me, but maybe not.
WB
LikeLike
Stephen,
The number of my hands is not anyone’s concern. You know the Indian goddess…?
LikeLike
WB,
Oh, all successful YA fantasy is like that. The adults are background. Think Charlie Brown’s parents.
Actually I grew up on Enid Blyton. (Not my fault the stork got drunk and dropped me in the middle of nowh… er… Portugal!) TRUST me, I can safely say J. K. Rowling did also.
If you want to read an hillarious send-up of the British boarding school story, which upends all the stereotypical characters, look up PTerry’s Pyramids.
LikeLike
The student assassin so loaded down he falls over? I loved that! And the time warping effects of the pyramids.
WB
LikeLike
Hmmmm, it seems to me that the REALLY “wildly creative” authors are mostly unread, not because they don’t write well but because most readers can’t handle so many new and unimagined ideas. Such writers tend to have small but devoted cult followings for most of their careers until reality starts to close the difference with their worlds and suddenly the writers are discovered as “visionary.”
The trick is for a writer to come up with ideas that lots of readers recognize as ones they had and thus feel smarter for the writer’s validation.
As for Rowling, her “genius” has been in the merging of established genres with charming characterizations. Starting with the melding of “magical reality” with English boarding schools, then telling mysteries and such within that framework. This is not a disparagment of Rowling; her phenomenal success means a) she attracted the attention of a vast number of readers (surely the first requirement of a writer-for-money or even an artiste; un-read books affect nobody) and b) by being accessible to a large range of readers she assures that there will be elements in her books that will be disparaged (McDonalds didn’t achieve its massive sales by offering good hamburgers; mass tatses are almost invariably somewhat bland.)
LikeLike
Absolutely right on Rowling. I never said she wasn’t a genius. It’s hearing her described as “incredibly imaginative” that makes me grit my teeth.
LikeLike
I can only imagine. In my experience, most folk who throw around terms like “incredibly imaginative” aren’t … and wouldn’t know imagination if it bit them on the butt. It does require a certain “genius” to be ahead of the masses, but not so far ahead they can’t see you. Real geniuses are less commonly showered with gold than visited by mobs bearing torches and pitchforks.
LikeLike
RES,
I’ve known a few geniuses like that. My younger spawn is at serious risk of this sometime…
BTW, as for “truly creative” authors I didn’t mean the incredible minority of amazingly, startlingly creative writers: i.e. those who amaze even me. I think I can count those on the fingers of one hand and don’t need half of them. Also frankly even I have to work hard to read those, because it does require stretching, unless they’re incredibly good at foreshadowing (EVERYONE — read Dave Freer’s solo books. No, seriously. If you don’t I’ll come to your house, take your cats hostage and beat you. You’ve been threatened. Dave IS one of those geniuses AND incredibly good at foreshadowing. But his being “just out” of the current trends makes it hard for him to get a following.)
What I meant by truly creative are people like Pratchett, say — yeah, you can trace most of his ideas and even his titles to other books/movies, but it’s put together in a completely startling way and it er… to coin a phrase… blows your mind. That is, it truly, dramatically changes your perceptions. I think (hard to tell, I was so young when I started reading him) that Heinlein did the same thing. Most writers are just regurgitating TV memes/movie themes/someone’s bestseller. IF you’re lucky they twine two of them. And yes, those people get recognition much faster than the more creative ones.
Humanity is very badly designed. Except that it’s the only game in town, of course.
LikeLike
Ah, well, Sir Terry is sui generis and rara avis, a juggler of ideas. He takes those snow globes of ideas that our civilization has been placing on shelves for millenia — and starts tossing them into the air, forming glistening fountains of thought and image. Sure, he didn’t create any of those snow globes, but he has found a way to juggle them in ways that charm, delight and reveal new insights.
In part, “genius” is a word tossed around too casually in this over-hyped culture. We would do much better to adopt the Britishism “brilliant” and reserve genius for those rare few whose ideas fundamentally alter our reality (or at least our perception thereof.) Actual genius is more often squandered, suppressed and shaken down for its lunch money in this neighborhood.
As to humanity being badly designed, I don’t know: I don’t know what humanity is designed to do.
LikeLike