Wondrous Tales

This might seem an odd moment to be struggling with something fundamental to my writing.  I’m closing in on the end of a novel draft, I have several pieces in revision, short stories out for consideration, and, since last year, I can claim to be professionally published.  If anything, this seems a moment at which to be more confident in my writing, and it’s true that I’m more confident in sharing existing pieces, those I’ve written in the past year or so, thanks to these factors.  2023 saw me produce some of my highest quality writing and stories to date, in no small part thanks to input from my writing group, but also because of my deliberate efforts at improvement.  As I rolled into 2024, though, my writing momentum faltered.  Many stories I began ended abortively, and I had the sense that something was missing.

It took me a month to realize that this missing something was the reason for these aborted stories.  The ideas were interesting, things I wanted to write about, and I could sit down and consider characters and plots and other elements that, in principle, should all work together to make an effective story.  Perhaps I’ve been thinking too analytically about stories rather than just sitting down and writing them like I used to – this can produce higher quality stories, but I’ve been finding that it doesn’t account for everything that a story needs to work.  Identifying that missing element, though, took most of another month, and it began with reflection.

To identify what was missing from my own stories, I began by examining the stories that I enjoy: not my own, but what I read.  My reading taste can perhaps best be described as eclectic.  Anyone glancing at my Goodreads lists, either or what I’ve read or what I want to read, or going through my book reviews here on the site, can see that I span everything from ancient Greek philosophy to hard science fiction.  What I needed to identify, though, was some unifying factor in the books and stories I enjoy the most.  What fascinates me so much about history, or about science, or speculative fiction?  What draws me back to epic fantasy again and again, no matter how much my tastes have broadened since the days when that was all I read?  It might seem foolish to think that I could come up with some unifying factor across such disparate genres and types of writing, and normally I would agree – I think many efforts to come up with pithy answers to complex questions are foolish – but I could tell that there was something these things had in common for me, so I persisted.

Putting a name to that something took me examining, not stories as a whole, but a more granular level of what I read.  I needed to catalogue for myself what moments in a piece, whether fiction or nonfiction, thrill me and inspire me to keep reading and writing.  These were obvious in fiction, especially fantasy, but they were harder to identify in other fields, less native to the writing itself and more arising from my own interaction with the text.  I looked also at my own writing, which of my stories I enjoy the most, and at that hole in the stories that weren’t working for me.  All of this reflection, eventually, produced a name for the sense I had for what was missing in my writing and what unifies the pieces I enjoy the most: wonder.

Again, this is most apparent in fantasy.  The moments in fantasy that keep me reading are the moments of magic – not the hard magic systems themselves, but the points when that magic is used in a wondrous way, to accomplish something that dazzles the imagination, that is extraordinary.  It is harder to express and identify how wonder exists in, say, Human Dimension and Interior Space, or an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, but I assert that it is there, that it is what keeps me reading them.  The wonder exists in the new things I learn, in how these kinds of books can redefine how I look at the world and how I understand the universe.  Wonder can exist in anything that prompts us to think in new ways, whether that’s a new scientific theory, a unique historical context, a philosophical concept, or an imagined magic.

Wonder is what was missing from some of my own story attempts.  Coming up with plots and characters based on expressing some idea that I wanted to write about wasn’t enough to conjure that sense of wonder that exists in all of the stories that I most enjoy.  I want my stories to have that wonder, to produce that sense of wonder in other people.  The novella I wrote about Defodyla and a unicorn queen works not just because it has somewhat interesting character insights, or because it has a decent plot, or because it has the intriguing concept of writing a story from the perspective of the powerful wizard who is usually a background, supporting character.  No, it works because it generates a sense of wonder.  The magic, the innovations on the magic, and the circumstances in which it is used all conspire to create wonder.

At least, I think I can create wonder.  Reader experience may vary, but that is what I want my writing to do.  Capturing wonder on a page, though, is a difficult thing to do deliberately.  It’s not easily defined and put into structures like plot, setting, and character can be, because it’s not a structural or textual part of the story; it’s rather something that arises from the text, an emanation of the writing that only has as much power as reader interaction gives it.  The stories I was trying to write failed because they were too focused on the technical aspects of writing and not enough on engaging that sense of wonder either for me or for the reader.

I think my writing has improved dramatically in recent times, especially since I joined a writing group and began submitting stories for publication.  Unlike how I used to write stories, I now consider matters of plot and character in more detail before I begin writing, so that I have a better idea of the conflict and where the story is going before I start writing.  That has meant I don’t end up with as many unfinished stories, both because I have the motivation to finish them, and because I know what the ending is supposed to be before I get around to writing it.  Now, I need to remember that my stories still need to be wondrous.  Otherwise, they’re just not worth writing.