Fiction

I don't know if I've ever given the impression that writing fictional pieces isn't the easiest thing in the world - what with my frequent posts about the difficulties I have with it and all - but it's actually quite troublesome and tiresome to be writing fiction all of the time. It's incredibly mentally taxing to be carrying around a world inside of your brain that needs to be filled with people and places, and follow certain rules that keep it functional and practical. To be creating backstories and laying out plans for the futures of numerous characters, putting them on the pathways to meet and interact with one another, creating friends and enemies, developing skills, so on and so forth. In essence, you are creating life with your mind.

But to a non-writer, none of that really computes. You're just making stuff up and putting it down on paper. It can't be all that hard, they make stuff up all the time, after all. They tell lies, they stretch the truth, they try to make themselves look good to impress someone. We've all done it - we've all been there. But these are single instances, and they're not always easy to come up with. Telling a bad lie can lead to numerous lies one after another, and the longer you try to keep up the charade, the more stressful it becomes.

And that's when it becomes you telling a story. A story, in a way, is just a lie played out for the long term. But that longevity is far more than any lie a reasonable person would tell, and it is a much more elaborate one. It's one that you don't just tell when it comes up - it's one that you are thinking about at all hours of the day, constantly building on and reviewing and editing until it's perfect. And it's not just something that they tell - we write it down so that our "lie" won't be forgotten.

Honestly, I don't know what else to say to people when they claim that writing fiction isn't a difficult thing to do. And yes, I have heard people tell me that before. Perhaps it's simply because I have spent so much of my life writing, but I can't really fathom how someone would think that telling fiction would be an easy thing to accomplish. The fact that there are so many terrible stories out there should be more than enough proof to the contrary.