Writing Is An illusion.
Dear friend,
I'm pleased to share some lessons I've learned through my craft as a fiction writer. I hope these lessons are helpful to you as they have been for me, apply to all genres, and may influence your style.
Thank you for reading.
Writing is an illusion.
The world the writer presents to their readers is an illusion.
If the illusion captures the reader's attention, then the readers will be immersed in the writer's world, and the book may become a success.
Yet, for this to happen, the writer's fiction must have a link to something believable, and the story must evoke feelings and emotions we all relate to, even if what it's about happens in other galaxies.
As a writer, you must maintain a delicate balance between the story you present and the reader's credibility and hope. I say this based on two fundamental principles:
1. Never go above the reader's level of credibility because they will stop trusting you.
2. Never go below their level of hope because they will stop caring.
The principles above are central beyond literature; they are the engine of politics, religion, sales, and all techniques that aim to convince people to do or buy something.
Writing, on the other hand, also requires research. This means not only studying external sources to make your world transferable to the reader's mind but also researching the "intimate you." You must understand your own goals, or hire those who understand the market, to bridge the gap between art and acceptance.
If you do your research well, you will be able to easily transfer your world, as you describe it through your words, into the reader's mind, and your book may become a success. I said it may, because, as you know, other factors influence the sales of your book. Please do your research, not only external sources but also knowing yourself and learning as much as you can about the intimate you and what you want to accomplish.
You see it? It's all magic. Now you see, now you don't.
I could also define writing as a communion between writer and reader. In here, I aim to achieve a result known in AI as next-word prediction, but which I would call next-image prediction. It indeed works like magic. You, the writer, begin describing a scene and immediately, by reading the first words, the reader projects the complete image before they finish reading the whole scene, and it comes to their mind exactly as you describe it. If you can do this, you are a writer and a magician, and because it's magic, you, the writer, don't need to explain the trick.
