Five Scary-but-Exciting Reasons to Write Fiction

If you’ve been reading Aliventures for a while, or hanging out with me on Twitter – or if you’re one of the approximately three readers who know me in real life – then you’ll know that, as well as blogging, I do a lot of fiction-writing.

I’ve been writing stories for most of my life, and I’d decided I wanted to be a “writer” before I hit my teens. Unlike some of my other childhood dreams (astronaut, prime minister, Queen of the World), I actually achieved this one: I make a living from taking words out of my head and putting them down on the screen.

As a kid, I never expected to be a non-fiction writer (and the word “blogger” hadn’t been invented). I’ve made about a hundred pounds from my fiction, total, but I still believe that writing fiction is one of the best things that I can do.

Writing fiction is challenging, it’s thrilling, it’s hard, and it’s sometimes revelatory. And if you’ve got any sort of facility with words, I’d highly recommend not just “giving it a go”, but spending some serious time on fiction-writing.

Here are five scary-but-exciting reasons why:

1. You Don’t Need Any Raw Materials

What I love about writing, over almost every other art form, is that you don’t need paints or canvas or stone or wood or a collection of beer cans to get started. You just take a blank sheet of paper or a computer screen and all the “raw materials” of fiction come straight out of your head.

This is fab because it means fiction doesn’t require much space, doesn’t cost anything to write (you can make do with scrap paper and a scratchy pencil), and you’ll never be missing that one vital thing to complete your project.

It can also be scary. If your writing isn’t as good as you’d like, you really can’t blame your tools. Great words don’t cost you anything more than lousy ones: they just take more thought and skill.

Ultimately, “exciting” wins out over “scary” here. You can sit down in front of a blank screen, spend some time tapping a keyboard – and create something that never existed before. If you get to make money from your fiction, it’s as though you’ve spun it out of thin air.

2. You’ll Find Out About Yourself

With fiction, the raw materials are you. Your thoughts, your memories, your dreams, fears, hopes. Through the last few years of writing – especially the past fourteen months working on my current novel – I’ve realised how much of “me” goes into my fiction. I’ve learnt more about myself from seeing what my characters do: the good and the bad.

If you write fiction well – if you bring your heart, not just your head to it – then you will learn more about who you are. Those characters who people the pages of your story all exist inside your head. Even the nasty ones who do and say things that you would never dream of doing in real life. (Except you do dream about it. That’s what your stories are: secret dreams.)

At the moment, I’m finding this scary and exciting in fairly equal measures. It’s scary to realise that, actually, you’re more like the egotistical, stubborn, self-absorbed bad guy than the nice-as-pie hero. It’s exciting when you figure out how to change a broken pattern in your life because you see it reflected in your fiction.

Writing fiction is a way to access your subconscious. Don’t go all over-analytical while you’re plotting or writing a story … but look at themes that crop up, or characters who hit just a little too close to home. What do you learn about yourself?

3. You’ll Escape Into Your Own Head

For me, writing fiction is qualitatively different from writing non-fiction. When I write a blog post, I’m very much grounded in the world. I might think about the reader, or about other posts I want to link to. If it’s a piece of my paying work, I might be thinking about the invoices I need to send, or about the other tasks I’ve got to do during the day.

When you write fiction, you get absorbed into the world of your story. Most writers (self included) do not lead lives that anyone would want to tell stories about. Ergo, there’s a good chance that whatever’s going on in your fiction is a tad more gripping than the daily ups and downs of your life. This makes fiction a great way of escaping from real-life worries.

The inside of your own head might not always feel like a safe place to be. Also, spending hours on your own in an imaginary world can make stepping back into the real one feel like stepping onto solid ground after jumping on a bouncy castle. There’s a mental lurch involved.

Still, if your life is ever a stressful, anxious or boring place to be … escaping into your own head, and telling a story, is a great way of releasing some of the pressure.

4. You Will Touch Your Readers’ Hearts

Although non-fiction can be moving and powerful, I suspect that few of my blog posts will ever stick in people’s heads for their whole lives. A great story, though, can become part of a reader’s mental landscape forever. And while they’re reading, it can have them completely immersed.

Fiction touches readers on a much deeper level than non-fiction. If we’re gripped by a story, we care about the characters. (Have you ever cried at a movie? Or when reading a book? Laughed out loud? Desperately cheered on a character to succeed – or hoped for them to fail?)

It’s hugely exciting when readers care about a piece of fiction and talk about your characters as if they’re real. There’s also an element of something more unsettling in here: as the author, you have power not only over your fictional characters, but over your readers’ emotions. You can be deliberately (or even accidentally) manipulative. Or, you can end up astonished – even a bit dismayed – when readers don’t react in the way which you expected.

5. You Can Read Your Work to An Audience

Last Wednesday, I was one of a group of eight students reading our work at the official launch of the latest edition of our online anthology (Goldfish: The Autumn Collection). It was a fantastic, and absolutely terrifying, night. I’ve not yet come across anything that’s quite so nerve-wracking as standing in front of an audience of assorted friends, new students, staff and literary agents and reading a piece of your fiction.

This isn’t, strictly speaking, part of writing fiction … but it’s a great adrenaline rush. If you end up taking your fiction a reasonable way, you might think about doing an MA / MFA. And if you get published, there’s a good chance you’ll end up reading at book events or festivals. It’s scary, yes, but it gets easier each time you do it, and being able to share your work in such a direct form is a lot more exciting than simply circulating pieces of paper (or electronic documents) amongst individual readers.

It’d be great to hear some of your own thoughts on writing fiction, especially if you’ve dabbled in it yourself (whether you’re an established author or a complete beginner). Does anything above resonate with you? Do you have scary-but-exciting reasons to write fiction that you’d like to add to the list?