Creative Writing

02 December 2014 Unknown 0 Comments

Unlike typography, I have a little bit of knowledge in the field of creative writing. Well, I don't know if I can say that. I have experience with writing creatively (though I don't know how proficient I am at making compelling stories yet).

If I had an area of creative expertise, this would be it. I love writing fiction. I tend toward scifi/fantasy. I try to give my stories a solid theme that helps us to understand the human condition and our spiritual condition and relationship to God. I've self-published one novel and I'm working on my second (plus several that I haven't published—or finished).

Creative writing is a great example of an artful activity that won't be meaningful without some engineering. Come to think of it, most authors "engineer" their work until it is valuable, but they probably wouldn't consider themselves engineers.

It's easy to come up with any story imaginable. You write about fire-breathing jellyfish that come from the sky and burn everyone's pizza every night. It's easy to wander around without end and make the most wild, horrific, or boring story that anyone has ever heard of, but it's not as easy to make a story that is meaningful to readers.

Stories go through so many drafts before they are published. In engineering land we call these iterations or versions, but it is the same idea. You have a great idea and so you write a first draft. This is your first attempt at a solution in engineering.

Next, you have to edit over and over, which is the same as iterating on a code solution in a high-level sense.

What I'm trying to say here is that creative writing follows our pattern of an artful activity that isn't meaningful to many people without an act of engineering.

But we're not just looking for things that fit into our mental model of creativity. We're also trying to find things that don't fit so we can understand creativity better.

I plan to post updates to my fiction-writing exploits here because they're part of my personal creativity journey which will hopefully inform our collective creativity exploration.

So who else is an author of fiction out there? Tell me in the comments what you write, even if it's not fiction.