The Moreness of Writing

When you write, you are more.

I can't exactly explain the "moreness" to you, but if you're a writer, you understand.  In the same way that I am never writing the stories I dare to call mine, but the characters are.  I am an instrument of creation fueled by a force I couldn't explain and can't understand.

Writing is so much a thing that requires you to push yourself outwards, further and further.  No matter what you write you must think, breathe, understand, listen.  You can't write people without understanding people, whether as a rote formula (albeit a broken one) or in an intrinsic way.  You can't write vampires without a basic understanding of human biology and a person's psychology.

Research is key to any piece of writing, no matter how fictitious and fantastical.  And more than research you must breathe and live your characters; these, these are the best books.  Where you are someone else entirely because the author became and grew and expanded.

You cannot be isolated from the world, from people, from nature, and expect to write something beautiful.  You must use all of the words in your repertoire, adjectivize and explain and show not tell and breathe the words.  Breathe life.  People are hopeless and wonderful and terrible and nightmarish and cruel and bitter and loving and passionate and powerful and immeasurable and every possible adjective.  And the world around us?  It is wonderful and hopeless and cruel and loving and passionate and terrible and nightmarish and passionate and powerful and bitter and indescribable.  If you haven't run out of adjectives, you haven't fully described the existence and wonder that exists in every subatomic particle.

At the end of the day, that is what you are writing - not a story, but people.  People in extraordinary circumstances or maybe not-so-extraordinary circumstances.  You are writing yourself in autobiographies and Jane Doe in biographies and dragons in fantasy and aliens in science fiction and imaginary friends in realistic fiction.  Take all the factors of all the books and you will see similarities and inspirations as all writers draw from one another.

There hasn't been a truly original, one-of-a-kind, no repeat story in centuries.  But there's been one-of-a-kind, original, beautiful, unrepeatable characters.  People.  In every book.

To write you must read.  Reading expands yourself, your gases and core elements, gives you inspiration and words when you run out.  I've learned words like facade, indisputable, curmudegonly, from books.  They fit neatly, kindly, and perfectly together, each story bringing a new word or a new way to use an old word.

Breathe out, expand, write.  The moreness comes when you believe in it.

And always, always write people.  The words will provide themselves.