Writer is a peculiar creature, often seen hanging around
with a strange group of friends. Research is Writer’s best friend, the friend
who is always there and who you mock because, hey, that’s what you do with your
best friend! Writer’s second best friend is Characters – people Writer talks
about constantly, pores over night and day to make sure that they develop into
mature people, the kind of friend who everyone thinks the writer is crazy for
crushing on. Setting is an important friend in Writer’s group, that one friend
who apparently takes charge. Finally, there is Conflict, the one friend who is
a slight attention whore who has to make drama for everyone, and who Writer
finds a solution for at some point.
“'A reader lives
a thousand lives before he dies ... The man who never reads lives only one.” (GRR Martin). The same is true of writers. Creative writing is an incredible discipline,
and I’ve often thought that some of the best writers out there must be some of
the greatest minds the world has ever known. The creation of worlds, histories,
and individuals is an astonishing feat in and of itself, and the authors
responsible for it go to a lot of effort to make it happen.
The writer and the reader share a unique relationship. For
me, being both a writer and a reader is about having a two-way existential
crisis: the characters are both fictional and real, and the same is true of me.
Fictional in the sense that they are avatars brought to life by imagination,
real in the sense that the character is able to make you feel for them. For
both writers and readers, stories offer the opportunity to live as many lives
as they choose, hence George RR Martin’s famous quote. When I studied English, I
found it tedious to analyse every aspect of a story because it felt like the
life was being torn away from it, so I decided to read History at university and
just enjoy the books I read.
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