I Get Questions

In Today’s Journal

* Quote of the Day
* I Get Questions
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

I Get Questions

A young writer friend email me with a pair of questions yesterday, two of the biggies:

​”Is making art (in this case, stories) pointless? I mean does it help people at all?”

Those questions are straight out of the critical mind, and every writer (artist, etc.) who ever lived has experienced them.

Is it pointless​ to write stories, novels, etc.?

No, of course it isn’t.

Do our stories help people at all?

Yes, of course they do.​ At a bare minimum, they provide readers with a few minutes’ or hours of entertainment and escape.

Just a few days ago as I write this, a writer commented on a post that she had read The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls and hated them. Those, a novella and a novel, are two of my absolute favorite Hemingway stories.

I’ve been entertained and helped in numerous ways, including as a fiction writer, by reading Hemingway’s work over the years. I still reread it often.

Here’s the whole thing: How can you or I or anyone else know how a story will affect another human being?

Every human being has different values and beliefs, different experiences, different tastes, different accomplishments and wounds, different good and bad baggage, etc.

No way can we possibly know how anything at all, including our stories, will affect anyone other than ourselves.

So (like everyone else) we simply do what we do because it’s what we want to do and what we love to do.

We paint a picture and hang it up in a gallery. Or we write a short story or a novella or a novel and publish it. And we move on to paint the next painting or write the next story.

Some people who read one or our stories won’t like it, but they’ll love another one.

Distance yourself from Outcome. Rest assured, your story will have either no effect at all or a similar effect or a completely different effect on every reader out there. Because each reader is a different person.

The best you can hope for is that your story entertains someone for a few minutes or a few hours. If it does, it might also help them. But it has no chance to help those readers whom it doesn’t entertain.

On one reader the story will have minimal impact. Maybe he’ll enjoy it as a few minutes’ or hours’ entertainment, but it won’t rock his world.

So what? Chances are, you’ll never know.

Another reader will read the same story and something in it will bring up a fond memory. Or a bad memory.

So what? Chances are, you’ll never know.

Another reader will read the story and something about it will change his life forever.

So what? Chances are, you’ll never know.

As writers, individually or collectively, we have no way of knowing the affect or impact our stories will have. All we can do is write them and put them out there, then write the next one.

I don’t even recommend taking upon yourself the burden (or sense of importance) that your story might “help” somebody.

Just write the story (if you want to), then publish it and go on to the next story.

Write your pleasure or your pain, what makes you ecstatic or happy or sad or frightened or confident. Then don’t worry about it.

Writers are neither the servants of nor the masters of the readers. Nor should we ever want to be. We’re storytellers. We’re entertainers.

We also live in a wonderful time, a whole new golden age of publishing. A golden age of fiction.

We have computers so we don’t have to hammer out our creations on old manual (or even electric) typewriters.

As Heinlein himself wrote about his “Business Habits” (Heinlein’s Rules) right after he posted them in his essay in Of Worlds Beyond (Fantasy Press, 1947)

“… they are amazingly hard to follow—which is why there are so few professional writers and so many aspirants…. But if you will follow them, it matters not how you write, you will find some editor somewhere, sometime, so unwary or so desperate for copy as to buy the worst old dog you, I, or anybody else, can throw at him.”

And today, we don’t even have to go through editors or publishing houses. Today we can go straight to the readers.

So if you’ve been bitten by the fiction-writing bug, count your blessings, write whatever you want, and publish it. Someone out there is just waiting for your story.

Of Interest

SAVE 90%: Screenwriting for Novelists Bundle This is not an endorsement, and I’m not offering an opinion either way. Just passing along the information.

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………… 800

Writing of Blackwell Ops 45: Sam Granger | Continuing Along the Ghost Trail

Day 1…… 2637 words. To date…… 2637
Day 2…… 3648 words. To date…… 6285
Day 3…… 3483 words. To date…… 9768

Fiction for May………………………… 81505
Fiction for 2025………………………. 459918
Nonfiction for May…………………….. 23680
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 124770
2025 consumable words…………….. 578178

Average Fiction WPD (May)………… 2911

2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 11
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 27
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 115
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 297
Short story collections……………………. 29

Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.

Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.

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If you’re new to TNDJ, you might want to check out these links:

• On Writing Fiction
• Gifts
• Writing Resources
• Oh, and here’s My Bio. It’s always a good idea to vet the expertise of people who are giving you advice.

Questions are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. But please limit yourself to the topics of writing and publishing.